


just another graceless night

by nebulastucky



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: (techincally), Based on a Lorde Song, Break Up, Canon-Typical Alcoholism, Coming Out, Drunk Driving, Excessive Feelings, F/F, Hand Jobs, Infidelity, M/M, Mutual Pining, Songfic, Title from a Lorde Song, Yearning, well. an album
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-11
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:26:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 23,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23100151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nebulastucky/pseuds/nebulastucky
Summary: Mac's first real relationship with a man ends in disaster, and it's up to the gang to help him recover and rebuild his confidence. While the gang collectively try to find a way to remind Mac that one bad relationship doesn't mean he's unlovable, Dennis is forced to confront his own feelings - big feelings - about Mac and the way their friendship is rebuilding itself, Frank takes Paddy's back to its roots, Charlie grapples with keeping track of Mac's love life, and Dee learns to live life out and proud.
Relationships: Dee Reynolds/Original Female Character, Mac McDonald/Dennis Reynolds, Mac McDonald/Original Male Character(s)
Comments: 37
Kudos: 101





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> huge thank you to tumblr users its-always-philly-in-sunidelphia and floralmac for creating wonderful wonderful art to go along with this fic!!! truly gorgeous work and I will not (cannot) get over their incredible talent.
> 
> this fic is on a break atm while i work on another project!!!! i do not control the hyperfixation!!!!!!!!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i. the louvre  
> our days and nights are perfumed with obsession

Sometimes an empty barstool is more than an empty barstool, Dennis muses. 

Dee catches him watching it, like if he looks hard enough it might stop being empty. With every drop of his blood, he hates her for seeing him.

“This is the third time this week,” she says, maybe to him, maybe to the stool. Maybe to no one. They drink in stilted silence for a minute, long swigs of beer that’s never looked more like river water than it does now.

“Fourth,” Dennis says, after what could be a century or no time at all - it’s difficult to tell these days.

“What?”

“It’s the  _ fourth  _ time in the last week Mac hasn’t shown up for work,” Dennis elaborates.  _ But who’s counting, right? _

Dee sighs beside him, deep and pitying, like Dennis is a sick dog on a commercial asking for donations they’ll never give. The sound makes his skin crawl, makes him want to rip it from his bones and start over. He keeps drinking. 

“Has he been home?” Dee asks, but she knows the answer.

Something ugly bubbles in his veins, a poisonous ringing in his ears that makes him spit his answer. “Why the fuck would he be home? It’s not like there’s anything there for him that Evan doesn’t have at his place.”

He feels embarrassed by the venom in his voice, unwarranted and bitter on his tongue. He’s not mad at Dee, not really, he’s mad at Mac. But Mac isn’t here - he never is, lately - so he’s just  _ mad. _ He’s mad, and there’s nowhere to put the madness.

The front door slams open. The Coors sign rattles in the window. Enter Charlie and Frank, yammering and yelling about - goddamn -  _ something, _ and Christ, Dennis cannot catch a break today. He watches them, rapt, morbid curiosity taking hold of his attention and steering it their way.

“- and it’s those crooks in Washington behind it, too, Charlie, I’m telling you -”

“It is  _ not _ a government conspiracy, dude, I know a conspiracy when I see one,” Charlie says.

Frank waves a hand at him. “You don’t know shit, Charlie. That bastard’s spying on me and I know it. Just give me a couple more days, I’ll prove it.”

Charlie sighs. “He is not - Dee, will you tell Frank that the new mailman at our building isn’t spying on him and he’s just trying to do his goddamn job, please?”

Dee balks at them, a strangled sound escaping from her throat. “You -  _ that’s _ what this is about?”

He huffs out another deep breath. “You are no help at all, Dee, you know that?” He turns to the empty stool beside Dennis then, and starts to speak again. “Mac, will you -”

He stops, his mouth slamming shut fast enough Dennis swears he hears teeth clatter. “Hey, Dennis, where’s Mac?”

“Why would I know?”

“You live with him?”

Dennis snorts. “Barely,” he says, like the truth of it doesn’t weigh heavy on his every thought.

“The hell does that mean?” Frank says. “What, is he li-”

“Oh, shit,” Charlie cuts him off, louder than any part of the situation calls for, “they moved in together?  _ Already? _ It’s only been, like -”

“Seventy-eight days, yeah,” Dee nods, fast enough that Dennis can watch a hundred strands of hair burst free from her braid. His free hand clenches and unclenches what could be ten times, a hundred times, a thousand, into a fist that craves broken glass and bloodied skin.

Things seem to happen in a flurry, a blur of movement and sound around him as he sits and tries to breathe his way through it. He looks up, and Dee is gone from behind the bar, and Charlie is dragging something from the back office, and Frank is scraping stools along the floor into the center of the room.

Charlie props the whiteboard on a stand and hands Dee the markers. There are four colours, Dennis learns. Red for time, blue for milestones, green for theories.

“What’s the purple?” he asks, despite himself. “Up in the corner. What’s that number?”

“That’s how long it’s been since the day my cable got cut off,” Dee says, “and we lost two weeks of  _ Days Of Our Lives  _ because Frank never got around to getting it fixed.”

“It’s your cable, fix it yourself, you bitch,” Frank grumbles.

“I’ll fix my own cable when Lani Price fixes her goddamn life,” Dee snaps, “now can we get back to the matter at hand, please?”

“Right, yeah,” Charlie says. “Dennis, when did Mac move in with Evan?”

“Specific to hour and minute.”

Charlie frowns at her. “We only need the date, Dee, you know that.”

“What, you think he doesn’t know the exact time the decision was made? Have you  _ met _ Dennis?”

Discussion - if you can call it that - devolves from there into bickering and then into squabbling and then into what threatens to become a physical fight if no one stops it in its tracks.

“They’re not living together,” Dennis mutters, and nothing happens. Then -

“Wait, what?” Charlie says, lowering his brandished broken bottle.

“They’re not living together,” Dennis says, louder than he needs to. Louder than he wants to. There’s another burst of rushed movement, and cries of “Write that down!” and “Does this still count as a development?” that ring through the bar at high octaves and higher decibels. 

“What do you mean, they’re not living together? You  _ just said _ Mac hasn’t been home -”

Dennis pinches the bridge of his nose. There’s not enough breaths in the world, no matter how deep, that can get him through this with everyone still in one piece on the other side of it.

“Is it going on the board or not?” Frank asks. Dee and Charlie look at each other, and all semblance of civility goes out the window.

In the chaos, Dennis slugs back what’s left of his beer and slips out into the back alley. The noise of the bar - tinny 80s music over speakers long past worn out, and the songless screeching of his sister - follows him out, but the quiet among the dumpsters is a welcome change. He pulls out his phone and dials Mac’s number, almost presses call. He doesn’t quite make it.

Calling won’t do anyone any good. He knows that. Hearing Mac’s voice - Hell, hearing any voice - right now won’t help him, won’t help his mood. Won’t do anything but stoke the fire burning up his brain. His thumb hovers over the screen, idle, hesitant.  _ The Golden God doesn’t hesitate, _ he tells himself.

(Dennis Reynolds hasn’t been a golden god for quite some time.)

He pulls up their text conversation, because that’s easier than making himself speak anything out loud. His last message, unanswered, mocks him.

_ terminator 2night? _

He sighs and starts to type. He hits send, and it feels like a concession of defeat.

* * *

The world is honey-glazed and glistening, and it makes Mac ache, a sugar-sweet sharpness in his every pore. He feels breathless every day now. It feels good not to breathe.

Evan is charming and classical in his handsomeness - all strong brow and stronger jaw, cheekbones that live in the clouds, eyes that pierce like a secret. He is tall and broad and runs cold against Mac’s hot, and every word he says is a rose from a different garden.

(They met on a Tuesday in May. A chance encounter in the produce section, another in line at the checkout, another in the parking lot of a liquor store. A confrontation, an accusation of stalking. An exchange of numbers. An exciting story to tell the gang back at Dee’s for movie night. A phone call that lasts half the night. A dinner date on Friday. A long, hot summer.)

They don’t do romance, not really. Not the sweep-you-off-your-feet, grand gesture, public declaration kind. 

Evan is a thrillseeker, an adrenaline addict. He takes them cliff jumping and knife throwing and kite surfing and white-water rafting and Mac feels huge. He feels like he could swallow the world whole and ask for seconds. 

This is how they spend their days: Evan drags them from his apartment to some white-knuckle exercise in peril, and Mac drags them back into bed to make up for his 40 years of lost time. Aside from the ever-present soreness, it’s a good system. It keeps them busy, it keeps them together, it keeps them away from the rest of the world.

_ The rest of the world is overrated, _ Evan tells him one night, when Mac lets his stray thoughts become words. He’s inclined to agree.

(Mac hasn’t seen the gang in weeks, it feels like. Maybe he hasn’t. Is that such a bad thing, really? He wonders absently, his body covered half by Evan and half by the greyed sheet draped across Evan’s back, if it’s worth going back to them.)

In the soft glow of late-morning light, his mind wanders. Has he ever felt like this before? This strength, this violence of emotion? 

He thinks of hair curled where a head meets a neck and a rage that is quiet until it isn’t. 

_ Maybe once, _ he thinks.

Evan’s place is meticulous. Every frame on every wall hangs straight, his clothes are hung neatly in one of those fancy sliding door closets they get on  _ Queer Eye _ all the time, the white tiles in the bathroom sparkle in even the dimmest light. Mac doesn’t think he’s ever seen so much as a dirty plate in the sink. Every time he comes here, he expects it to be different. He expects to see - something. A dirty sock that didn’t make it all the way to the laundry hamper. An old coffee mug on an end table. A pizza box that doesn’t fit into the trash right. He expects to see something - anything - that makes this one-bed apartment look lived-in.

His phone buzzes on the hard wood - teak, maybe, he’s never asked - of the bedside locker, a symphony of hammers striking a fragile silence, and rouses Evan from his dozing. He looks at Mac and smiles with his gums.

“Who’s texting you so goddamn loudly in the middle of the night,” Evan says, all hot air on Mac’s shoulder.

“God, bro, your breath reeks,” Mac says. He doesn’t make a move for the phone.

Evan grimaces and rolls off him onto his own side of the bed. “Don’t call me  _ bro _ . This isn’t a frat house.”

Mac reaches for the phone then. He sees the message and who it’s from, reads both and feels a strange pit open up in his stomach, and decides to ignore all three.

“It’s not the middle of the night,” Mac says. “It’s, like, early afternoon at best.”

Evan sighs beside him, indignant and dissatisfied. “I was asleep. That makes it the middle of the night.”

He hoists himself up onto his side then, to look at Mac, and says rather than asks, “Who was it.”

It’s hard to know which way this will go. Some days Evan hates the gang. He’ll pick fights with Mac about the fact that he still lives with Dennis, still owns part of the bar, still calls any of them his friends. On other days, though, he doesn’t. On those days, he can’t push Mac hard enough into the arms of Paddy’s Irish Pub.

“It’s Dennis,” Mac says, because it’s the truth.

Evan tenses beside him, and his words come out clipped. “What does he want.”

“They need me on the night shift tonight,” Mac says, because it’s easier than the truth.

Evan is quiet.

“I can tell him no,” Mac says, because he feels like he should tell him no. Because he  _ wants _ to tell him no, if it means he can stay here in this bubble, this haze of touch and sweat and Mac-and-Evan.

Evan smiles at him again, and he is the sun. He is the sun and Mac is a man freezing.

He kisses Mac’s shoulder, and then his neck, and then all along his jaw, and Mac’s hands shake as he types out a quick reply. He sets his phone down, clumsy, and rolls onto his side. He hooks a leg around Evan’s waist, his foot pushing and pulling them closer, closer, closer, and Evan kisses him on the mouth, deep and slow. As agonies go, this feels holy.

The world is theirs, Mac thinks, with one hand carding through Evan’s hair and the other much, much, lower. He pries a gasp from Evan’s lips.

The world is theirs, Mac thinks, and they are kings.

He whispers, “I love you,” into Evan’s skin, and with every breath and touch and kiss he hears it back.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ii. hard feelings  
> time to let go of this endless summer afternoon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> due to quarantine reasons i am updating early. next update will (probably) be in a couple of weeks as scheduled.

Mac walks into Paddy’s for the first time in a week, and time doesn’t stop. It’s a Thursday morning, and the world doesn’t end when he sits on the corner barstool.

The men’s bathroom door opens and closes, and Charlie says to the back of Mac’s head, “Hey, pal, we’re not open yet, and frankly it’s a little unhealthy to drink at this -”

Mac turns then, and stops him in his tracks.

“Oh, shit,” Charlie says. “I thought you were with Adam today. And all other days.”

“Evan,” Mac corrects him; the grating pointedness of his tone surprises him.

“Yeah, Eddie, whatever. Him. Do you even work here anymore, man? What are you doing here?”

Mac gapes at him a moment, unsure what to say. 

Charlie runs the head of a dry mop across the floor. “So are you guys, like, living together and shit now?”

“We’re - what? No. What?”

“It’s just Dennis said, and then he didn’t, and then he walked out and didn’t come back for, like, an hour - and he was all, like, depressed-looking when he came back, too, man, it was not a good look on him. I think he cried, dude, his face was all red and puffy and, like, just totally ugly -”

Mac pinches the bridge of his nose. It’s been a while since he’s been the sole victim of Charlie’s nonsense storytelling. Charlie is still talking, even as Mac pulls a hand down the side of his face and starts seriously questioning his decision to come here today in the first place.

“- and you know I like to get high as much as the next guy, Mac, you know that, but I just thought, like, dry-erase markers?  _ Really? _ It’s kinda childish, or something, you know? And, I mean, Frank just wasn’t getting it. Like, at all. And he got all riled up at some shit Dee said about how she was still using the markers and we shouldn’t be huffing markers at work anyway -”

It’s never like this with Evan, Mac thinks. Evan doesn’t huff markers, Evan doesn’t have  _ opinions _ on what kind of solvent gives the best high and which ones are juvenile, Evan doesn’t have to be told not to get high during office hours. Evan doesn’t ramble incessantly.

“Charlie -”

“- and it’s not like I really care about who pays for Dee’s cable as long as it gets paid and we get our show, you know? But Frank turned it into this whole thing about, like, pride or honour or some shit like as if we were in that show about dragon boobs or whatever it is, and it’s just like, what’s the point, you know? Like, we all know Frank’s gonna pay the bill any-”

“Sweet Christ, Charlie, I can’t do this,” Mac says. “Where is  _ literally _ anyone else?”

Charlie’s teeth clash loudly as he shuts his mouth. His lips purse, and Mac almost feels bad.

“Dennis and Dee are in the back office,” Charlie says, and turns his back on Mac. His dry mopping finds a way to look pissed off.

“ _ Thank you, _ ” Mac breathes, a short prayer to no one in particular. 

Then, “Wait, did you say Dennis is here?”

Charlie looks at him funny, fixing his posture in a way that makes the straight line of his back look sharp. “Yes,” he says, “Dennis is here. Dennis works here. Not sure if you remember, but Dennis  _ bought _ here. What the hell is going on with you, man?”

“There’s no -” Mac says, then stops himself. He’s not sure he has the self-control to get into this with Charlie.

“Jesus Christ,” he says, and he’s on his feet before he can really think better of it, “I’m going to talk to Dennis and Dee.”

“Whatever, man,” Charlie says, “it’s your funeral.”

Mac is close enough to the door of the back office that he crashes right into Dennis as he storms out of it, hands in the air and pure frustration on his face. He catches Mac with an elbow to the chin. The short sting of it sends signals to Mac’s brain to feel pain, but ends up waking something else that hasn’t seen the light of day for a long time.

Mac rubs his chin and swears. Dennis doesn’t apologise.

“Jesus, dude -”

“Dennis, what are you even doing? We’re not done here,” Dee calls after him. She scrambles out the door after him, and Mac is met by another bony elbow.

“I am!” Dennis yells, and then the front door is slamming shut and he’s gone, like he was never even here.

Dee chases him with only half her heart, just far enough to poke her head out the door and shout after him, “Don’t come back here without my markers, jackass!”

The distinct sound of the horn of Dennis’s Range Rover blows back at her. She returns to the bar with a sour twist to her mouth and a knifelike crease in her brow. She is most of the way to the back office again when she whirls, and points a skeletal finger at Mac.

“Why are you here?” she hisses. The words bounce around the room, around Mac’s head, around the city, and sound like they were ripped from the pit of Dee’s stomach rather than her throat.

He doesn’t have a real answer, not to this question - so similar to Charlie’s line of  _ what are you doing here _ but a million miles away from his simple curiosity - so he tells her the same thing he should’ve told Charlie: “Fuck you, Dee, I work here.” 

Clearly unsatisfied with his answer, she stomps past him into the back office, their interaction a momentary typhoon.

Mac decides, then, that if everyone’s going to keep asking him what he’s doing here, he may as well have a good answer.

For once in his life, Mac does his job.

* * *

Dennis doesn’t come back to Paddy’s. He doesn’t go home, either. 

He buys Dee’s new markers and snaps each one in half. Then, he sits in his car until he forgets how it felt to see the bar a little less empty.

It is a long night.

* * *

Mac goes to Paddy’s again on the cusp of Friday evening. He strolls in a few hours after late-lunchtime, and meets Dee’s sharp edges for the second day in a row.

He catches a muttered, “Out of my  _ way, _ goddamnit,” instead of a  _ hello, _ and then she’s gone.

Mac finds Charlie scrubbing the bar like his life depends on it, a mechanical harshness to the busy drag of a sopping wet cloth. He looks up at the sound of the door closing. If he tries to hide the surprise that creeps into his face at the sight of Mac, he doesn’t try very hard.

“Holy shit, you’re here again?”

Mac lets out a world-weary sigh. “I  _ work _ here.”

Charlie gives him a look, like he wants to ask if Mac’s sure. He goes back to his scrubbing.

“What’s Dee’s problem lately, man?” Mac asks. He settles onto the corner barstool and tries not to breathe in the fumes from Charlie’s bar-bleaching. “She’s, like, so mad at me all the time.”

Charlie dunks his rag into a bucket by his feet and moves further down the bar. 

“Frank’s been making her do your job since you’ve been gone,” he says. “She’s pissed at all of us, but it’s mostly you. I think she’s just been waiting for you to show up so she could, like, let it all out, or whatever. Man, she hates door duty.”

Mac nods. “No one tips a bouncer.”

“No one tips a bouncer.”

Dennis materialises behind the bar, sudden as a gunshot, and traps Mac in a gaze he thought himself free from long ago. 

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Dennis says, a sudden jerk on the rope of delicate tension that has stretched between them these last few months.

Mac bristles. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Why are you here?” 

“Why does everyone keep asking that? I work here,” Mac says, his voice a high and pleading thing.

Dennis closes his eyes a moment, takes a breath, tries again. “I  _ mean,  _ why aren’t you at Evan’s place like usual?”

“Why does your wellbeing suddenly hinge on whether or not I’m at my boyfriend’s house?”

“That’s not -” Dennis sputters, and Mac thinks if he looks hard enough he’ll see a couple grey hairs sprout from Dennis’s temples. “I just mean, it’s a Friday night. Shouldn’t you be on, like, a date? Or something?”

His eyes glaze over a little at the prospect of  _ something, _ and whatever that might entail. Mac leans the smallest amount over the bar toward him, a pointed finger raised like a weapon. 

“For your information, Dennis, since you clearly crave it,” he says, annoyance rising into his voice like bile into a throat, “Evan’s maid is out of town this weekend so she’s fixing the place up today, instead.”

“Really,” Dennis speculates, and Mac gets the feeling he’s choosing his words very carefully. “And you believe that?”

“What are you - of course I believe that. I have literally no reason not to. Where are you  _ going  _ with this?” Mac’s leg starts to bounce where it rests on the crossbar of the stool, and he can’t make it stop.

“You’re telling me,” Dennis continues, “that the reason you’re not spending quality time with the man you love, is because he’s got the cleaners in?”

Mac says, “Yes.”

“He’s getting his apartment cleaned.”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

Dennis looks at his watch, flashy and far too bulky for his wrist. “At six o’clock.”

“I don’t see what -”

“On a Friday night.”

“I don’t know if I’d call this night-time -”

“So, to summarize: he can’t see you on a Friday night, the night many people would consider the ideal date night, because he’s  _ getting his apartment cleaned? _ ”

Mac sighs. “ _ Yes.  _ That is what’s happening.”

“And you couldn’t, say, catch a movie instead? Go to dinner? I hear that new Thai place by the theater’s good, you could do both.”

“No, we -” Mac begins. “Dennis, please. Just say whatever you’re trying to dance around, I don’t give a shit anymore.”

It’s very clearly a struggle to restrain his smugness, and even after clearing his throat, a little bit escapes into Dennis’s voice when he says, “I don’t think your Romeo is telling the truth, pal.”

Like hackles on a wolf, the hairs on the back of Mac’s neck stand to attention, and his pointed finger becomes a dagger.

“Fuck you,” he spits. “You’ve never liked Evan, you never even tried to get to know him! You know you’re the reason I don’t bring him here? This is just another one of your sick manipulations, and -”

“Prove me wrong.”

“- and I - what?”

Dennis repeats himself, a tight smile on his lips and the devil in his eyes, “Prove me wrong.”

Mac forces himself to turn his gaze to the other end of the bar, where all sounds of scrubbing have fallen silent. “Charlie, man, what do you think?” 

Charlie looks up at him from a notebook he’s pulled from god knows where and says, casual as anything, “I’m just trying to get all the facts. Frank’s gonna want this on the board.”

“What board?”

Charlie’s hands seem to take on a life of their own as he gestures vaguely and largely. “You know, the board _. _ The board!  _ The board, _ Mac! Oh, man, Dee’s gonna be sorry she missed this.”

Mac turns back to Dennis. “What the shit is he talking about?”

“Not important,” Dennis promises, but the way he shifts his stance says otherwise, and Mac doesn’t believe him. “What’s important is finding the truth.”

“Why would Evan say he’s getting his place cleaned if he’s not? Why would he  _ lie _ about that? Why would he bother?”

“Because he’s got something to hide.”

Mac folds his arms across his chest and purses his lips. “Like what?”

Dennis doesn’t take the bait. He holds up his car keys, the silver of the chain dull in the dank light of the bar. “Only one way to find out.”

* * *

The Range Rover pulls up outside Evan’s apartment building and Dennis kills the engine. On this nice side of town with its tidy buildings and daintily expensive lives, Mac and Dennis are sore thumbs inside their beast of a car. Silence rests upon them like guilt.

Mac stares up at the window he knows to be Evan’s living room, his hands folded nervously in his lap. He’d expected to still be calm at this point, assured he knew the truth, but now anxiety hums in his blood and rings in his ears and he’s not so sure anymore. Dennis reaches over and unclicks his seatbelt for him.

Mac looks at him then, glowing in the light of the tumultuous sky of a summer about to break in two, and it doesn’t hurt like it used to. “You’re not coming with me?”

“Why would I come with you?”

“I don’t know,” Mac says, and climbs his way out of the car. The slam of the door behind him feels more final than it should. The walk to the building feels worse.

“Let me know how it goes,” Dennis calls after him.

“You’re not gonna wait?”

“Can’t wait forever,” Dennis says. Mac makes it to the doorman’s desk, and then he hears the engine start up again.

The doorman is a nice guy, Mac supposes. He’s a little like Charlie, in that he seems to trust Mac and could do with showering more often. He sends Mac up with a spare key and no comment about the forced straight line of his mouth or the obvious worry in his brow. He takes the stairs two at a time and has an excuse for being here uninvited ready on his tongue. 

Third floor, left at the end of the hallway, second door from the end. He wills his hand not to shake as he raises the key to the lock.

(The sun is a curious thing.) 

The door opens, Mac pushes his way in and doesn’t close it all the way. The silence from the hallway follows him.

(He gives life and warmth and all light things to the world - )

“Evan?” Mac’s voice bounces off the walls and the pristine floors. 

He knows this apartment like the back of his hand. There are three rooms: this kitchenette turned dining room turned living room whose wide windows face the street below, a bedroom bigger than any Mac has ever seen in a place this compact, and an ensuite bathroom.

( - and in the same breath, he steals colour and burns and scorches and smoulders.)

“Evan?” he tries again, one hand on the door to the bedroom he knows so well. Slick jazz leaks from the space between the door and the floor. Mac recognises it, briefly, before the sound of it is drowned out by the hammering of his pulse.

Mac opens the door.

(If it weren't for the sun, we wouldn't know heat and fire and passion.)

Gasps. A strangled cry. Half a scream, swallowed just in time. A scramble to cover up, to pretend and lie and hide. 

“What the fuck is this,” Mac says. 

“It’s not what it looks like,” Evan says, and for the first time, Mac hears a lie.

“Oh, do tell, Evan, because it  _ looks _ -” Mac nearly chokes on his words, caught in his throat like cement “- like you’re fucking a random guy who is  _ not _ your boyfriend.”

“Mac,” Evan pleads, and now he’s crossing the room to him, barely covered by the sheet clutched tightly to his chest. “I swear -”

“I can’t believe this,” Mac breathes. “I can’t believe you. I can’t - what the  _ fuck, _ man?”

His voice starts to break, and the rage in him dissipates into nothing. Evan reaches one hand out to touch him, and Mac almost lets him before he remembers himself. He stumbles backward, back into the living area, and wants to die.

“Mac,” Evan says again, like Mac is a deer by the side of the road, a life already lost. “You can’t have thought this was forever.”

“Are you serious right now, asshole? I’m forty years old! Of course I -  _ are you breaking up with me? _ ”

“Mac, please, let’s just -”

“You’re breaking up with me,” Mac says, and the room starts to spin, or maybe he does. “I just caught you banging some other -  _ fuck _ \- some other  _ guy,  _ and now  _ you’re _ ending it with  _ me? _ ”

There are tears in his eyes now, and in his voice, and surely on his face, though he’s lost all sensation on his skin. He considers, fleetingly, getting into Evan’s face and just screaming every foul thought he’s ever had - but that would mean looking at him, having to be close enough to touch. His hands go to his head, tugging and tugging on his hair until he starts to think it’ll all come out in his fists, and he’s staring at the floor.

“I can’t be here,” he realises.

He hears the soft pad of bare feet against the polished linoleum floor, and Evan’s voice, insincere and unfeeling as he now knows it’s always been, saying his name one more time.

“Mac,” he says, “I think you need to leave.”

_ Gladly, _ Mac thinks, or maybe he says it, and in the blink of an eye he’s throwing the spare key in the face of not-Charlie the doorman and bursting through the front door of the building. Into the rain the city has been craving all summer.

(If it weren’t for the sun, we wouldn’t know the searing pain of scorn.)

The Range Rover is gone, and Mac is well and truly alone.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> iii. liability  
> says he made the big mistake of dancing in my storm, says it was poison

“Mac?” The sound is thin through the door. “I’m going to Paddy’s. Now’s your chance if you want a ride.”

Mac says nothing, like he’s been saying nothing for days. Maybe it’s weeks. Maybe it’s his whole damn life. He wishes it were. Maybe then he wouldn’t have gotten himself into this whole nasty business in the first place.

He feels more than hears Dennis sigh on the other side of the door.

“Just -” Dennis starts, and Mac can hear him struggling. There’s a lot of that going around. 

“Take a shower or something, man,” Dennis says, but that’s the wrong thing to say and he knows it. Mac can picture him running a hand down his cheek before he remembers that touching your face is bad for the skin. 

“I stole a casserole from Charlie’s mom. It tastes like shit, but it’s in the fridge if you want it,” he tries, but that’s wrong too. A whisper creeps into Mac’s mind to ask if there’s a right thing to say. It’s hard to believe there’s anything right in the world anymore.

There’s a quiet, “Oh, whatever,” and then Mac hears the front door close. Alone again. For a brief, blissful moment, he revels in the quiet, and tricks himself into thinking he can see the dust settling around him. In truth, the dust has been settled in this room for a long time. 

Then, he remembers why the world is quiet now. 

Every morning tastes the same - silence and ashes and whatever it is in the air that makes him feel like it’s crushing him. His morning cup of joe, when he finally gets up to make it in the late afternoon, has become far more Irish than it is coffee. He hasn’t showered in six days, not since he crawled in for an hour after stomping home in the rain that night. 

That day plays on loop in his head. Every time he wills time to fuzz the details, the picture sharpens and the volume turns up. The whole ordeal feels seared onto the inside of his head, the look of shock on Evan’s face and the fear in the eyes of his new toy. Mac wishes he was blind.

* * *

When the front door opens again, and it’s Dennis home for lunch, Mac is still in bed. 

They’ve developed a routine, the two of them, in these troubling times. Dennis comes home from the bar for every meal, brings something for Mac to leave uneaten, and props Mac’s bedroom door open to talk at him about all the fresh nothing going on at Paddy’s. Today is Mexican for lunch, and Mac has a distant thought that the chimichanga Dennis lays out on the table for him is not going to keep for the several hours it’ll take for him to get out of bed and reach it. 

“Dee’s been weird today,” Dennis tells him. 

This is nothing new, of course, Dee has never been anything close to normal. Mac says nothing.

“She’s still on door duty while you’re not there,” Dennis continues, deliberate in his word choice. “Usually she’s pretty loud about how pissed she is about it - she, ah, uses a couple different f-words, if you catch my drift - but today, I don’t know. She’s real quiet today.”

That is, undeniably, weird behaviour from Dee. It’s never been her style to stew silently on anything. Mac says nothing.

“I guess it might have something to do with the gay bar thing,” Dennis says.

Mac sits up. “What gay bar thing?”

The words scratch against his throat, so harsh he thinks it might bleed. It’s the longest string of words he’s come out with for almost a week.

Dennis barely reacts to his monologue becoming a conversation.

“You remember, years ago, when Dee had that friend from her sad actors club or whatever?” he says. “And he helped us get the bar really busy, but it turned out he turned it into a gay bar?”

Mac remembers. He remembers barely being able to move around the place without crashing into a sweaty body, he remembers his cousin congratulating him on how far he’s come, he remembers making more money in one night than in the whole time they’d owned Paddy’s. He remembers how Dee’s friend looked at Dennis like he wanted to eat him alive.

“Yeah, I remember.”

“We’re doing that again. Just, on purpose this time, I guess.”

“And you think Dee’s not on board?”

“She’s on board,” Dennis says. “But Frank wants to make sure we pull in more than just guys this time, so he’s not stuck looking at a bunch of twinks grinding on each other every night.”

Mac must pull a face at that, because Dennis clarifies: “His words, not mine.”

“Frank wants to do a ladies night twice a week,” he continues. “I think Dee’s pissed about it because it means she won’t be the only chick in the bar anymore. She’s just sort of been sulking all day about it. Christ, it’s pathetic. She’s all moping and shit, any time anyone talks to her she looks like she’s about to explode, her face goes so red.”

Mac swings his legs off the side of the bed and stands. Something in Dennis’s face shifts, like there’s a different light in his eyes, and Mac is sure he’s watching him scramble for something else to say about Dee.

“I’m going for a piss,” Mac tells him, to save him the trouble.

When he comes back, Dennis is gone again, and the chimichanga is wrapped up in the fridge.

* * *

“How’s Mac,” Dee says. It’s not quite a question, anymore, it’s almost become a form of greeting. It’s the safest way to start a conversation with Dennis, these days.

“He got out of bed,” he tells her, slouched against the wall behind the bar. “He actually spoke, too.”

She rests her elbows on the bar and looks up at him. “That’s good, right?”

“It’s more than he’s done the rest of the week,” Dennis agrees. “I really wish he’d take a shower, though. God, his room reeks. He got up for the toilet and I tried to go in and open the window, but I couldn’t make it far enough. I thought I was gonna choke. He’s living like shit, Dee.”

She shrugs. “At least he’s talking.”

Dennis rubs his eyes and tries to make sense of any of it. The facts are simple enough to get his head around: Mac’s first ever real relationship ended in the worst way possible, and now Mac is spiralling, and Frank has chosen now of all times to try to cash in on the admittedly very marketable demographic that is the gay community in Philly. The effects of all of these facts, though, are what Dennis is struggling with. 

He’s not convinced that Frank’s gay bar idea is all that’s wrong with Dee. She’s only letting on that it’s working the door for a bar that could never benefit her in the way of a relationship that bothers her, but as much as it pains him, Dennis knows his sister. There’s something else going on, he’s sure, but asking about it would surely put him at risk of being bitten.

He opens his eyes again, wary of the absence of her shrieking, and she’s gone. 

She’s not by the bar to yammer at him about her problems or anyone else’s, she’s not at the door doing her job, and when Dennis checks, she’s not in the back office trying to escape. 

He sends Charlie into the ladies’ bathroom with a mop and no bucket to check there. He comes back empty handed. 

“Dee, you slippery bitch,” he mutters. He catches himself glancing at the door every other minute for the rest of the night.

Dee never comes back.

* * *

Three days later, Mac lets Dennis leave without him in the morning, but goes back to work with him after lunch.

“Are you sure about this?” Dennis has the key in the ignition but his hands in his lap, ready to go nowhere if he needs to. “We don’t have to go to Paddy’s. We can just - I don’t know. Go to a movie. Sit in the mall and make fun of moms in yoga pants.”

“Just drive, Den,” Mac says, and he can’t look at him because he doesn’t know what he’ll find. 

The drive to Paddy’s has never been a long one, but Mac comes out the other side of it feeling thirty years older. The context of their last drive together suffocates him, entombs him, chokes every other thought in his head. They don’t talk the whole way there. 

Mac walks in, and three different voices call out to him, “Holy shit,” and he is a magnet forced against the wrong pole. Dennis pushes at his back so he can get past - the sensation lingers far longer than the contact, a barely-there ghost of a feeling - and makes his decision for him.

He takes a look around, like it’s his eyes that are fresh and not the new lick of paint on the barstools to match the walls. The lights aren’t brighter, not exactly, but they feel cleaner and less like a no-budget prison movie. 

He realises he’s been standing in the doorway far too long, just taking in the new scenery, when Dennis appears beside him again with a cold beer extended toward him. He takes it by the neck, careful to avoid any more contact with Dennis’s skin. He doesn’t know why.

They sit together, all five of them, in one booth. It feels like old times, it feels like nothing at all.

“You look like shit,” is the first thing Frank says to Mac.

“Fuck you,” is the first thing Mac says to Frank.

“Give him a break, Frank, you know how this shit goes,” Dee says, so quiet Mac almost doesn’t hear it. He looks at her, and finds her eyes glued to her hands on the table. 

“So, like,” Charlie starts, and Mac wants to crawl inside his own skin, “what happened with Evan? It’s been like a week now, and Dennis still won’t tell us.”

Dennis sighs. “I already told you, Charlie, it’s not -”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Mac says. “Not yet, at least.”

“But -”

“Charlie,” Dee hisses. “He doesn’t want to talk about it.”

“You’re the one that said -” Charlie frowns at her. “For the board, Dee.”

“Will you forget about the goddamn board?”

“Hey, I paid good money for that board,” Frank says, “and the bitch at the store wasn’t even nice about it.”

The bickering and arguing goes on and on and on for what might be a hundred years. Mac feels himself aging as he drinks - he switches, at some point, to room temperature tequila, straight from the bottle - and watches. Frank's words turn harsh and liquid, and Dennis’s hands are starting to shake from the effort of keeping them away from someone’s neck, and Charlie’s voice is loud enough to wake the long dead, and -

Dee says something, or maybe she doesn’t, but the gang falls silent when her lips move.

“Christ, Dee, if you’re going to say something I don’t give a shit about at least say it loud enough that I can hear it,” Dennis laments. His eyes roll skywards, his chin tilting up to help them on their way. Mac doesn’t watch the way it exposes the pale shock of his throat, doesn’t watch the way the skin shifts and tightens around his words.

Dee takes a deep breath, and her face is splashed red and pink and ghostly white. Her eyes flick over to Mac, blink and you’ll miss it, and then return to hyper-focusing on her chipped nail polish.

“I’m a lesbian,” she says. Her words shake like a skyscraper on a fault line, like a beggar in the rain. Like a woman on the edge.

“You’re -” Frank chokes on his own spit. “Deandra, what in the hell are you talking about?”

“You’re not a _lesbian,_ Dee,” Dennis says. He laughs, almost, but it comes out as nothing more than a nervous burst of hot air. “For Christ's sake, look at yourself. You’re not hot enough to be a lesbian.”

Dee is silent for a long time. Hearing opinions and borderline insults roll off of tongues like waves, Mac can’t blame her. When the waters still and the noise stops as the gang’s eyes rove over Dee looking for hints, she asks, “Are you done?”

 _Not even close,_ Mac thinks.

“Not even close,” Dennis says.

“Fine,” Dee submits, luck gracing her for once as she stands from her spot at the edge of the booth. 

“I thought you guys would get it,” she says. She grabs her bag from the back office, throws their booth one last look, and storms out of the bar. Every time Mac sees her, it seems, she is closer to becoming a whole hurricane.

The silence she leaves behind her is a knife, just a breath away from breaking skin. 

It’s a long time before Charlie says, “What the hell was that?” to no clear answer.

“You guys think she’s serious?” Dennis asks, quieter than he’s been all day. “You think Sweet Dee’s actually gay?”

Charlie says, “No,” at the same time that Mac says, “Yes.”

“She’s slept with tons of guys, dude,” Charlie says, “she can’t be serious about this.”

“I’ve slept with a bunch of chicks,” Mac shrugs. “I slept with Dennis and Dee’s mom.”

“Why do you always have to bring that up, man?”

“My point is,” Mac says, his voice a little bit louder, a little bit meaner, “you guys saw how hard it was for me to come out. People don’t just say shit like that.”

They fall silent again for a moment, and Mac thinks maybe he’s actually gotten through for once. He thinks, maybe they’ll see his side - Dee’s side - and actually agree.

Charlie says, “So what does this mean for the gay bar thing? Are we still doing that?” and Mac realises he was a fool to even consider changed minds a possible outcome.

“You guys are assholes,” he says, and follows Dee’s footsteps out the door.

* * *

Mac wanders the city for two hours before he spots Dee through the window of the millionth quirky coffee shop he passes. She sees him, too, and her eyes go wide. A quiet bell chimes above the door as Mac walks in, and a much larger bell hung over an elaborate display of numbers announces him with a more forceful _ding._

Dee is stuffing her things into her bag when Mac approaches her table.

“I don’t want to hear it,” she says. There’s something off about her voice, and at first Mac thinks she’s been smoking, until he sees the red of her eyes and the awkward puff of the skin beneath them.

“I come in peace,” he tells her, hands raised, palms out. She stops stuffing, but still eyes him carefully as he sits down.

“I figured you might need an ear,” he says. “I think I do, too.”

Dee says nothing. She slides her purse back down to the floor, and avoids the eye of the waitress walking by.

“Why did you do it?” Mac asks, because his mind has been on fire with that question for hours.

Dee sighs, and rubs at her forehead. “It’s stupid,” she says. “I can’t believe I did it like that.”

“So it’s true?”

She meets his eyes for the first time since he sat down. “Yes, it’s true. _God,_ of course it’s true, Mac.”

“Then tell me why,” Mac says.

“Because.” Dee takes a breath. “Because you didn’t want to talk about Evan.”

Something horrible and excited - sadness, rage, melancholy, hurt - crashes through Mac’s chest at the sound of his name.

“You didn’t want to talk about it,” Dee continues, “and the guys didn’t want to talk about anything but that, so I thought, why not, you know? Why not now? Why not give them something else to talk about?”

Mac looks at her, watches her knuckles turn white around her coffee mug. “You were trying to give me a way out. You _came out_ to save me from having to talk about my goddamn break-up?”

“God, don’t say it like that,” Dee says. “Look, you can tell the gang whatever you want. I just thought. I don’t know. Maybe you’d want them to focus on something else, for a while.”

The waitress comes around again, and Dee still won’t look at her, even when she offers to top up her empty cup.

“On the house?” Her voice is kind, and Mac wonders if that’s natural or just for work. Dee doesn’t look up, but nudges her cup in her direction, and it dawns on Mac that it might be something else entirely. Dee doesn’t say thank you.

Once the waitress is gone and chatting with some teenagers at a table across the room, Mac asks Dee, “Is this why you didn’t want to do the gay bar thing?”

Dee fiddles with a sugar packet, bites her lip. “It’s not - I mean, it is, but not. It’s complicated.”

When Mac doesn’t say anything, just looks at her, she sighs and rolls her shoulders. She tears the sugar packet and tips it into her coffee.

“It’s not that I have a problem with being a gay bar,” she says, but won’t look at him. “I remember the money we made last time. I’m not an idiot, I know it’s good for business. I just - I didn’t want to do it if I wasn’t out, especially with Frank’s whole ladies’ night thing, which is so offensive it’s insane, and I wasn’t ready to _be_ out until this afternoon. I mean, last time we did this, I didn’t even know I was gay. God, I wasn’t even sure _you_ were gay.”

Mac purses his lips. “Well, that’s hardly surprising, Dee, it’s not like I’m -”

Dee buries her head in her hands. “Mac, can you stop flaming for five goddamn minutes so I can talk about me?”

“Evan cheated on me.” Mac says it without really meaning to. He’s only said it out loud once before, to Dennis, when Dennis found him sitting fully clothed in the shower long after the hot water had run out. This feels the same.

“I guess I only realised - what?”

“He fed me a lie about his goddamn housekeeper,” Mac continues, and now it just won’t stop, “and Dennis got inside my head and made me paranoid, so we went over there and I caught him in bed with some other guy.”

Dee says nothing. Mac can’t be sure if that’s a good thing.

“That’s why I didn’t want to talk about it, back at Paddy’s. Dennis knows what happened, because he found me after, but I can’t. I can’t talk about it with Frank and Charlie. Not yet.”

“Charlie’s your best friend, Mac. You’ve known him since you were kids.”

“Yeah, but he’s also kind of a moron. And Frank won’t get it because it’s a gay thing, and I just. I can’t do it.”

Dee looks at him with something like pity in her eyes, he can feel it burning into his skin, burrowing holes where he refuses to meet her gaze. 

“I loved him,” he says, but that’s not quite right. “I still love him. Shit, Sweet Dee, I don’t know if I’ll ever stop. Every time I think about him I see them together, and I - Christ, it’s killing me. I think I’m going out of my mind.”

Dee sits back in her chair, a violent movement, and lets her mouth twist into something harsh and sour. 

“He’s a scumbag,” she says. “You know that, right?”

Here's the thing: Mac does know. He knows she's right. He knows that if it were Charlie or Dennis or, hell, maybe even Dee herself in his shoes, he'd see red and nothing else. But it's not them, it's him, so it's different. Instead of setting the fires, he’s the one being boiled alive.

They sit in the coffee shop for a long time, until Mac’s legs start to bounce under the table and Dee’s hands are itching for something to do that isn’t just holding a hot mug. 

Dee throws a five down on the table with their long empty cups and says, “I can’t take this anymore. Let’s get out of here.”

They walk in aimless silence for six blocks; Mac counts them. 

He asks her, “How did you know for sure?”

Dee doesn’t say anything. Then, “Do you want to go to the arcade?”

* * *

The skeeball machine in the back is easily as old as they are, a fossil left over from a simpler time. It’s been maintained, sure, but only to make sure it keeps up with the price inflation on every other machine in the place.

“I swear, these things never used to be this expensive,” Dee says. She surrenders another dollar to the machine.

Mac reaches for a ball, and she slaps his hand away. “That one was just warm-up. It’s still my turn.”

Mac says, “You didn’t answer my question. From before.”

Dee says, “I’m not sure how. It’s - it’s complicated.”

She rolls three balls, one after the other, not a breath between them. She doesn’t look at the score, blinking at her from a board of faded neons above the holes. Tickets creep out of the machine like a python. She rolls another ball.

“It’s been -” she starts. “I don’t know. It’s been a few months, I guess. Maybe a year.”

“That’s not what I asked,” slips out of Mac’s mouth before he can stop it.

“Wait,” he says then, “a _year?_ ”

Dee fishes another dollar from her wallet. “Yeah. A year.”

Mac grabs a ball and lets it fly, careful to avoid Dee’s sharp edges. It sinks into the fifty-point hole. 

“I met this woman,” Dee says then, and has to clear her throat. “I met this woman, and it was - I don’t know. It was different. She was different. I can’t call it anything else.”

The score on the board keeps ticking over, and Dee keeps talking. 

“I just - I don't know. She had the seat next to me at a movie, and some asshole trying to get past made me spill my popcorn all over the place. I was ready to just sit there and be pissed for another hour and a half, I really was, but then - I guess she was there alone too, because she shared her bucket with me.”

She sighs, and gets her fingers stuck in her ponytail trying to run them through her hair. She undoes it, and combs her fingers through. Mac watches her wince when she catches herself on a tangled patch.

“So that’s it?” Mac asks, because he knows it isn’t. It can’t be. Things like this don’t happen like that, not for them.

“No,” Dee sighs again. She slips Mac’s wallet from his hand and takes three dollar bills. “At first I thought, this chick is just being nice. I didn’t get it, but whatever. I took some of her popcorn. It wasn’t a big deal. The movie ended, and I thought that was it, I’d never have to see this girl again.”

She hides her face in her hands, and says to her wrists, “But then I saw her when the lights came up, and she asked if I wanted to go for a drink, and I said yes before I could think about it.”

“So you went for a drink with one girl and now you’re gay?” Mac says. “Dee, I don’t know -”

“ _No,_ ” she says. “It’s not like that. It’s like - we went for the drink, and we talked about the movie and she was just - I felt like she _got_ me. So I gave her my number.”

Mac crosses his arms and turns to her. “Dee -”

“Christ, save it, okay?” Dee huffs. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that this might be a hard story to tell?”

She doesn’t look at him, just stares straight ahead. The red glow of the scoreboard catches her, dyes her skin pink, just this side of surreal.

“I gave her my number,” she says, finally. “And we just - we just _talked._ For hours. Days. She thought I was funny and she said I was beautiful and - she treated me like a person, I guess. And then she was all I could think about.”

Mac thinks he’s heard this story before.

Dee lands two balls in a row in the hundred-point pot. The board flashes in front of her, different colours of praise. Her eyes are trained on them, but Mac can tell she doesn’t see them.

“All I thought about was how I felt when I was around her, and when I could see her next, and whether she was thinking about me, and how she felt - how _all of it_ felt different. I’ve been with guys before where I thought I loved them, but this. This was just different. I wanted to feel this forever.”

Tickets trickle still out of the machine. Mac finds himself hanging on Dee’s voice, for once not an assault on his senses. 

“Then I met this guy,” Dee says. “And that’s sort of when I realised. He was nice, and he was handsome, but I just - he didn’t make me feel the way Marcie did. At first I thought maybe I was just bi, you know? Or maybe she was a once-off. But then I started noticing other women - at the Wawa, downtown, in Paddy’s sometimes, even. And they were all beautiful, and I hated them, except that I didn’t. I’d talk to them, and they would listen and talk back, and I just felt - I don’t know, normal. Like this was how it’s supposed to be all the time. None of the guys I’ve ever been with made me feel like they did.”

She rolls her last ball and walks away from the machine. There’s something about the awkward slope of her shoulders that sits uneasily with Mac. He watches her go for a moment, waiting for the quiet discomfort in his chest to settle. It doesn’t. He snatches up the tickets and follows her.

He meets her again at the prize stand, eyeing a ring embedded with a harsh green lump of plastic. The lights from the games bounce off the glass of the display case, dancing, a sort of dizziness about their flashing. 

“What happened with the girl?” he asks.

Dee hands over her tickets and the spiky-haired teenager behind the counter drops the ring into her hand. It doesn’t shine.

“She moved across the Atlantic and never spoke to me again,” Dee tells him. “I think she’s in Scotland now. It’s hard to tell. All of her photos are of the countryside, and that shit all looks the same. Buy me a hotdog.”

* * *

Dennis locks up for the night, and Mac and Dee haven’t been back. Part of him wonders, absently, if they’ve killed each other by now. Another part wonders if they ever met in the first place.

Dee isn’t like Mac. None of them saw this coming. When Mac came out, in an office building the colour of depression, there were no fireworks. It wasn’t with a bang, there was no parade, no one fainted from shock or spent the rest of the night thinking about it to the point where it interfered with what little business they’d managed to drum up that night.

Frank and Charlie left at the same time as the last patron of the night, and Dennis still can’t tell, even now, if he was glad to see them go. The quiet is nice, sure, but it leaves room for thoughts and feelings to make themselves at home around him, elephants far too big for the space Paddy’s has to offer them.

He turns off the lights around the bar, a well-paced descent into the recesses of the dark. His hand meets the switch for the final _open_ sign, and that descent becomes a plunge. He looks back into the gloom of the bar and feels the barest hint of what he can only think of as retroactive regret for a mistake made long ago.

Behind the wheel of the Range Rover, Dennis thinks, maybe Mac will be at home. 

He doesn’t think about Dee, or the abstract concepts of loneliness and its sworn enemy hope, or whether or not he wants Mac to be at home when he gets there, or the tusks he has felt digging into his back all night long.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> iv. loveless  
> bet you wanna rip my heart out

Mac wakes up on a Wednesday three weeks after the break-up, and his blood doesn’t feel like molasses anymore. Instead, his veins run raw with acid, every inch of his skin an electrical fire.

He’s out of bed at the crack of dawn, nervous energy crackling in his fingertips. The idea of doing anything quietly seems impossible as he clatters and crashes his way through the kitchen, a hundred things happening at once. He puts on coffee, he slams the lever on the toaster, he uses the sharpest knife they have to decimate some fruit and lets the faucet blast it clean.

Dennis emerges from his room around the second time the fridge door is slammed just for the sound of it, sluggish and still dragging a t-shirt over his head. Mac nearly catches his fingers in the door on the third time.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Dennis’s words claw their way up his throat and into the stale air of the apartment.

“I’m not depressed anymore,” Mac tells him. “I’m fucking pissed, bro.”

“That’s great, man, but why are you taking it out on the kitchen?”

Mac stops in his tracks. “I need something else. You’re right, Dennis, I can’t just beat up the kitchen. I need something else.”

“Alright,” Dennis says, “that’s better. Let me get dressed, we’ll head down to Paddy’s and see if we can’t find you something to smash up there.”

* * *

“No way, man,” Charlie says, defiant and tall with a bat in his hand. “You are not bashing my rats. You won’t get it right, I’ll have to bash ‘em all over again, and then there’s just blood and guts and meat everywhere and it stinks out the whole place.”

“C’mon, Charlie, please?” Mac realises, too late, that this is the same voice he used on Evan every time he tried to get them back to his place instead of into another break-neck activity Evan called date night.

“No. Absolutely not. What the hell is this about, Mac? You’ve never wanted to bash the rats before - it’s Charlie work, man, you wouldn’t touch this shit with a ten foot pole. What gives?”

“Oh, haven’t you heard?” Dennis says. “Mac woke up on the weird side of the bed this morning. He’s moved past moping and straight into rage.”

Charlie’s face lights up. He looks at Mac then, eyes dancing to the tune of his sly grin. “We can work with rage.”

For the first time in what feels like years, Mac cracks a smile. “So I can bash the rats?”

“What? No.”

“But you said -”

“Would you trust me on the door, Mac? Would you trust me to do your job right?”

“That’s different, man, this is just hitting rats with a -”

“Oh my god,” Charlie says. “I cannot - I refuse to believe you just said that to me. I take pride in this stuff, Mac, and if you think - if you think this is just, I don’t know, Whack-a-Mole, then you can - you can just go to Hell, dude.”

“Are you shitting me right now, man? After everything I’ve done for you. After everything I’ve been through, you won’t even let me bash some goddamn rats?”

“Why would I ever let you bash my rats? This is pointless, Mac, you don’t even really want to bash the rats. You know I do this for a reason, right? I don’t just bash rats for the fun of it, man, this is important shit. You’re just looking for a, uh, an -”

“An outlet?” Dennis offers.

“An outlet! You just want to bash the rats because you’re pissed off at Aaron -”

“Evan.”

“Whatever, man, who gives a shit? You can’t bash your ugly boyfriend so you think my rats are the next best thing, and that’s not healthy, dude! You can’t just bash another man’s rats because the thing you actually want to do is illegal or whatever. It’s not cool, man.”

“This is ridiculous, Charlie, just give me the -” Mac sighs, a deep and heavy thing, and reaches for the bat. Charlie’s grip tightens, and he holds it high above his head.

Dennis gets this far off, foggy look on his face. Charlie doesn't see it, but Mac has always had a hard time not noticing Dennis.

There’s a hollow thwack, and a sharp pulsing in Mac’s shoulder.

"I have a better idea," Dennis says, emphatic and pronounced, and disappears into the back office.

“Did you just fucking hit me, dude?” Mac sputters. “Are you trying to bash me right now? That’s like - that’s a hate crime, Charlie!”

“Just because I’m bashing a gay does not mean I’m gay-bashing -”

“That’s exactly what that means, dude! How is that not what it means? I’m gay and you’re hitting me with a goddamn bat!” 

Thwack.

“Did you just hit me again? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Dennis emerges from the office with Dee behind him, dragging with her a dry erase board covered in half-eroded nonsense. Mac spots his own name and Evan’s, wrapped in barely legible dates and timestamps, and forces himself to feel nothing. His shoulder throbs beneath his hand as he rubs it. The rapid beat of it calls him a liar.

“If everyone could take a seat,” Dennis gestures vaguely toward the stools lining the bar, still tucked in from closing the night before. Mac slots himself in between Charlie and Dee, and tries not to notice how neither of them will look at him with the messy evidence of his relationship with Evan on the board in front of them. 

“What the fuck is this?” Mac says, and waves generally at the scribbles laid out in front of him.

“Doesn’t concern you,” Dennis tells him. “Charlie, you got a rag I can clean this shit off with?”

“What do you mean, doesn’t concern me? That’s my name up there.”

“It’s done now, it’s not important.” Dennis says this more to the board than he does to Mac, Charlie’s already filthy swatch of cloth swiping away months worth of thoughts and theories.

“But that -”

“Can we just focus on the matter at hand here, Mac?”

“You haven’t told us what the matter is!”

The board is bare now, the story of Mac-and-Evan erased. Mac tries his best to think of it as a clean slate. He eyes Evan’s name, the ghost of blue ink still clinging to the board, and lets it burn right through him.

“Mac,” Dennis says. “Before we get started here, I need to know if you’re in the right headspace for this.”

“The right - what the fuck does that mean? The right headspace for what?”

Dee shifts on her stool beside him, and still won’t meet his eye. 

“We’re going to find out everything we can about Evan’s dirty mistress,” Dennis says, and something clicks in Mac’s brain, “and then we’re going to avenge you.”

* * *

“Is everyone clear on the plan? We all know our parts?” Dennis caps a green marker with a flourish and pivots to assess the reactions.

Dee barely glances up from her phone, thumbs tapping a furious dance across the screen. “Got it.”

“I am, uh, not really -” Charlie starts.

“Sweet Christ, Charlie, how are you not getting this yet?” Mac huffs. “We’ve been here for five hours!”

“Well, I mean, there was a lot of squiggling on the board -”

“Writing? You mean writing?”

“Is that what that was?”

Mac buries his head in his hands. “Can you just - go through it again, Dennis, I’m gonna lose my mind.”

“Charlie, you call Frank and see if he's got a guy. Ideally he’d be here already and you wouldn’t have to, but here we are,” Dennis says. The next two instructions, he writes on the board: “Dee, get catfishing. We want this guy to be open and sharing. Mac, I need you to take me everywhere you went with Evan. We gotta get into his head if this is going to work.”

Charlie raises a hand.

“What.”

“I do not understand what's happening,” Charlie says.

“You don’t -?” Dennis pinches the bridge of his nose. “Just go call Frank. Jesus Christ.”

Charlie shrugs, his eyebrows sky high. “Okay, but I don’t -”

“For the love of -” Dee looks up from her phone, finally, and cranes her neck to stare at the ceiling. “Just call Frank and get him to come here!”

“Alright, sure, I can do that,” Charlie agrees. “You don’t need to yell.”

Mac finds himself at the door before he realises he’s moved. His fingers wrap around the handle, but he can’t bring himself to open it. He’s definitely pissed to a royal degree, the fire in his belly an unstoked inferno, but he’s still sad. He’ll be sad for a long time, if every self-help book under the sun is to be believed, and revisiting every intimate moment he had with Evan isn’t going to make that easier.

He’s drawn out of his thoughts by the shock of Dennis’s hand clasping his shoulder, a short squeeze of the muscle there.

“You ready to head out?” Dennis asks. Mac meets his eye, and the hand is still there, right where his shoulder meets his neck, and it burns like ice.

Dee says, “Yeah, I’ll just grab my stuff and we can go,” and Dennis turns to gape at her so fast Mac hears a crisp snap from the collar of his button-down. Dennis stands there with his hand still on Mac and his eyes on Dee, quiet for so long Mac has the time to re-learn how to breathe.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Dennis asks.

Dee’s eyebrows bunch together. “I’m going with you guys. We’re doing your Benjamin Button thing, or whatever.”

Dennis finally removes his hand to drag it down his face. Mac somehow feels its absence more than its presence.

“Dee, what in God’s -” Dennis starts. “You’re staying here. Why would you come with us? What purpose would that serve? What possible reason would there be for you to come with me and Mac?”

“Well, I mean, I - I don’t want to be stuck here with Charlie!”

“You don’t want - for the love of Christ,” Dennis says. “You need to be here, goddamnit, you’re not coming with us.”

“No,” Dee tells him. “I’m coming with you guys. My job is to screw around on my phone for a while, why do I have to do it from here?”

Dennis pinches the bridge of his nose and swears under his breath. He turns to Charlie, then, and asks him, “Are you clear on what’s happening? Do you understand the plan?”

Charlie shifts his weight around, shuffles his feet. “Sure I do. We’re going to find the guy Eric cheated on Mac with and go to his house and, like, fill it with catfish or cat food or whatever, and then something about dogs, I think?”

“Is Frank on his way?”

“Yeah.”

“Perfect,” Dennis says. “Dee, you have to stay here and explain to Frank what the plan is, because Charlie’s a goddamn moron. Bye.”

And there’s Dennis’s hand again, on the small of Mac’s back this time, a searing heat pushing him out the door. It’s been a long time since Dennis has touched him like this, or at all, and the unwilling thrill of it revitalises a part of Mac he never really noticed fall dormant.

The Range Rover idles on the curb while Dennis fiddles with mirrors he doesn’t need to, a chariot of a machine. With one final check, and a slap at Mac’s hand when he reaches for the radio, he pulls away into the road and -

Dee runs out in front of them. Dennis drops his foot on the brake like a boulder before he recognises her, and smacks the rim of the steering wheel in frustration when he does.

“What the hell is this, Dee?” he yells.

Dee yells something back. She points at Mac through the windshield and yells some more, all of it muffled by the windows. They don’t make a move to open them.

“Den,” Mac says. His mouth is full of dust. Dennis says nothing, and continues watching his sister’s wild movements, reading her lips with abject interest.

“Dennis,” Mac says.

“Hmm?”

“Drive.”

“She’s right in front of me, man -”

“So run her over, I don’t give a shit. I can’t do this with you if she’s there.”

Dennis looks at Mac then, tears his eyes from Dee. Jagged. Dennis looks at him, at the tight knot of his brow and the deep bags under his eyes, and Mac feels exposed like a nerve. Something in his posture or his eye shifts, Mac can see it, and he snaps his head back to the road.

Dennis drives.

* * *

“Next left,” Mac says. He jabs at his phone screen for a minute. “I think.”

“Well, is it or isn’t it?” Dennis squeezes the steering wheel tighter. He imagines the taut white skin of his knuckles giving way and exposing bone, and how exciting that kind of pain would be. He glances over at Mac, with his tongue peeking out between his lips as he concentrates on Google Maps, and loosens his grip.

“Um,” Mac says, “no.”

“No?”

The road ahead of them is dusty and quiet, and Dennis wonders if it ever sees enough cars to even count them as part of the traffic. They’ve been driving forever, it feels like, and Dennis is half-convinced every distant gas station is a mirage until they pass it.

“No. It’s the one after. Sorry.”

“I take it you weren’t the navigator when you and Evan did this stuff,” Dennis doesn’t mean to pry, except that he does. Mac doesn’t like to talk about Evan all that much now, and he was never around to talk about him when they were together except to brag, so there’s a lot Dennis doesn’t know. None of the rest of the gang know either, but it doesn’t weigh on them like it does on Dennis. It’s a strange feeling, he thinks, not knowing everything about Mac’s life anymore.

“Well, I mean,” Mac says, “Evan was the one taking us there. He knew where shit was already, he knew where he wanted to go. I guess I was just, um, along for the ride.”

Dennis braces himself on that last part, preparing for Mac to have some sort of emotional outburst. This is a strange feeling, too; he’s so used to seeing Mac do the same for him. It’s almost funny that he’s on the other side of it now, trying to anticipate the next move in a game of chess they’ve been playing since high school.

The outburst doesn’t come, so Dennis takes the left-after-next. Mac stares out ahead of them, his mouth a studied straight line, as buildings spring up from nothing along an ashy dirt road.

“Outdoor rock climbing does not seem like the safest activity for a first date,” Dennis says.

“It was our third,” Mac says. “Me and Evan’s first date was at a bar with one of those mechanical bulls. He bet me three shots he could stay on longer than me, and I was already pretty wasted so I took him up on it and - well, you saw my black eye.”

Mac should’ve known from the start. He should’ve known right from the get go that Evan would hurt him - he put him on a robot designed to throw you around the place, and made sure he was good and drunk first. Mac should’ve known. Dennis almost says it, as they drive past the sign looming at the entrance, but bites his tongue.

The parking lot is empty, and Dennis wonders why, until he steps out of the safety of the air conditioned Range Rover and into the blistering heat of late August sun. He basks, briefly, in the shadow of the company sign as they approach the run-down shack Mac swears is the welcome desk.

Dennis throws the admission fee at the lumpy teenager behind the desk, in exchange for two harnesses and an insurance form. He fills in some - not all, never all - of their details and lets Mac run off to meet the instructor. Dennis watches him go, until the door closes behind him and he’s all the way out of earshot.

“I’m trying to get some information,” he says to the kid. “Do you recognise my friend?”

The kid doesn’t lose his bored expression, and sounds like he’s trying hard to have his voice match it. “Yeah, I guess. He used to come here a lot with another guy. We don’t get a lot of business when it’s hot like it was this summer, so I guess they stood out.”

“The other guy -”

“Evan, I think.”

“Yeah,” Dennis says, and his throat is slick with bile at the sound of it, “Evan. Has he been here recently? With a different guy, maybe?”

The kid blinks at him. “I’m not supposed to talk about the other customers, sir. It’s policy. I can’t give you any information like that.”

“Hey, c’mon, man,” Dennis forces a smile. “We’re just having a conversation. You don’t have to be like that.”

“Sorry, sir,” the kid says, and it’s like Dennis can see a curtain drop as he slips on that mask of professionalism and corporate lines. “Company policy.”

Dennis looks at him, at his unruly hair bursting from the sides of a hat plastered with the company logo and acne scars that will never fade.

“What are you, sixteen years old?” Dennis asks.

“Seventeen, sir.”

“Minimum wage, right?”

“Saving for a car. Every penny counts.”

“Every penny counts,” Dennis repeats, and pulls his wallet from his pocket. “How about I give you this pretty penny with an old man’s face on it, and you give me the insurance form you made Evan and his friend sign. I’ll even do you one of the old guys that doesn’t have a musical about him. What do you say, huh? What the company doesn’t know won’t hurt ‘em, right, pal?”

“Sir, I -”

“Look, kid, I’m just trying to help my friend out here, he’s going through some stuff and this’d be really useful for, you know, the healing process. Or whatever. Just give me the damn form and I’ll be on my way.”

He hesitates. There’s a look in his eye that strikes Dennis as the long lost missing link between suspicion and fear, and it makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. The kid reaches for a desk drawer then, and rifles through it. Dennis watches him like a vulture.

Dennis takes the form, snaps a photo of it, and hands it back.

“Wasn’t so hard, now was it?” he says, shark grin stuck on his face, and walks out the door.

The kid yells at his back, “You didn’t pay me!” 

Dennis peeks his head in the door one last time and tells him, “That would be a bribe, kid. And those are generally pretty frowned upon in this country.”

The sun outside is maybe even harsher than before, and by the time he makes his way to the climbing wall a hundred yards away from the reception shack, Dennis has broken a sweat just from the walk. He finds Mac halfway up the wall and already stripped of his shirt. The shine of sweat on his back is like a lighthouse even in all this bright. It’s blinding; that’s what Dennis tells himself as he forces himself not to stare.

“He’s a natural,” the instructor says. He’s an old guy, liver spots on his face and wisps of silvery hair all over his body. He offers Dennis the other harness.

“I’m good down here,” he tells him. He tries to stuff his hands in his pockets, but the heat makes it unbearable. “I’m not really one for heights.”

Dennis wanders away and sits down on - he hesitates to call it a bench, it’s more of a log with a chunk missing. He pulls out his phone and sends the insurance form to Dee so she can start stalking. Once it’s gone, and the apparently desperately lonely instructor is back beside him, Dennis reaches his arms out along the sides of the seat and spreads his legs open wide. He lets himself watch Mac, then, and tries to imagine a breeze.

* * *

They go to three more places before Mac decides his restless, angry energy has been spent.

“For now, I mean,” he clarifies as he hops up into the Range Rover. “Tomorrow might be different. Right now I just want to get drunk, I think. Do we have any absinthe at the bar?”

Dennis slams his door and wants to bathe in the sound of it. “If I wake up tomorrow morning to you beating the shit out of the kitchen again, Mac, I’m gonna be pissed.”

“No, dude,” Mac says, “that’s out of my system now, I swear. I think. Probably, right?”

Key in the ignition. Roar of the engine. Mac’s eyes on him, soft, searching.

“Probably,” Dennis says, and peels out of the parking lot. “I still can’t believe he took you axe-throwing. Who the fuck does that?”

“He said he saw it on The Good Wife once and wanted to try it. Or, wait, no, it was the other one. The spin-off show, without the chick from ER in it. Fuck, what’s it called -”

“Christ, who cares?” After a beat, “Did he make you watch all of those shows? Because ER is from, like, the 90s, that shit can’t be still good.”

“Evan was super into them,” Mac says, and when Dennis glances over at him he’s talking to his hands. “I just sort of wanted to bang, you know, but he always wanted to watch his shows first, or whatever. They’re not that bad, honestly. One of them has the chick from Mamma Mia in it.”

“Meryl Streep was in ER?”

Mac laughs, just a bit, and Dennis feels a little bit of the tension in his shoulders leak away. “No, like, the one that was supposed to be sexy or whatever. She’s in one of them. Not ER. I don’t know her name. She’s in charge of a law firm, or she wants to be in charge of a law firm, or she knows someone in charge of a law firm. I didn’t really watch that closely.”

Mac starts talking, then, about how he thought he saw the McPoyles while he was out with Evan once. Dennis doesn’t listen, not really, he just lets the sound of Mac’s voice wash over him.

They’re on a highway, and it’s dark, by the time Dennis tunes back in to what Mac is saying. He takes his eyes off the road to look at him, and there’s - it’s almost a glow, like Mac is being lit up from the inside while his mouth moves a mile a minute. He stops talking when he notices Dennis looking, and Dennis feels a rush of shame in his cheeks. 

The road around them is quiet enough that it could just be them, only them, for the rest of the universe. 

“What are you looking at?” Mac says. The grin of storytelling is still there, loose and comfortable on his face, and Dennis tries not to feel at home in the light of it.

Dennis drags his eyes back to the road ahead, empty but for the streetlights. 

“Nothing,” he says. “It’s just - forget it, it’s dumb.”

“No, man, tell me,” Mac insists. His hair, his face, his eyes, all flash different colours in the mismatched highway lighting.

“I don’t know, man,” Dennis says. “It’s good to have you back is all.”

Dennis doesn’t look at him. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to stand it, the bright shine of the puppy-dog eyes he can already feel on the side of his face. No, he decides, it’s better for everyone to keep his eyes trained on the road.

For a long time, Mac says nothing. For a long time, Dennis wonders if he should’ve said anything at all. 

He pulls the Range Rover into its usual spot outside their building, and they sit there a while, the engine quiet and the air between them somehow both dead and electrified.

“Thank you,” Mac says. “For today. I really - just. Thanks, Den.”

Dennis looks at him then, finally, for just a moment. Quietly, he thinks he could look for a hundred years. 

He climbs down out of the car and walks into the building, into the solitude of his room in their apartment. He doesn’t say a word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> up next: things get a bit steamy. a bit horny. a bit yearny


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> v. green light  
> we order different drinks at the same bars

There are good days and bad days. The good days are light and easy and feel like hours, and leave Mac feeling kinder than he did when they started. The bad days are horrible, dreary things, and Mac finds he doesn’t remember them all that well beyond the solid coldness of glass in his hand and the sharp sting of liquor down his throat.

It’s a bad day when Dee marches her way into the nest he’s made for himself in the back office. She swipes the bottle - tequila, vodka, whiskey, does it matter? Mac hasn’t noticed a flavour for hours - from his grasp and replaces it with a cup of coffee. She swigs from the bottle and winces.

“What the hell is this, rubbing alcohol?” she says.

“Do I look like I know?” Mac thinks he can taste the slur on his words.

Dee takes another hit from the mystery liquid. It doesn’t go down any easier.

“Drink your coffee,” she says, “you’ll need it.”

Mac takes a sip. Too hot and bitter as all hell, and there’s nothing he can do about it. Isn’t that just his luck?

“For what.”

“It’s a year since I met Marcie for the first time, so I’m going out and I’m getting laid and you’re coming with me because if you don’t, Dennis’ll end up going home with some poor chick who’s still tricking herself into dating men, or he’ll go home with a guy and I don’t think any of us is ready for that conversation yet.”

“Where are we going?” Mac says. “Why does Dennis have to come? Why do I have to come?”

Dee rolls her eyes. “You’re my wingman, or whatever. Just drink your damn coffee.”

Mac takes another sip. “Do you have any sugar?”

“Do I look like a Starbucks? Get your own sugar.” She turns to leave then, her fist clenched tight around the neck of the bottle as she drags it up to her lips again. She hisses at the taste of it.

“Dee,” Mac calls after her. She doesn’t turn. “Where are we going?”

He doesn’t see it, but he can feel her roll her eyes again, frustration leaking into the set of her shoulders. “We’re going to the Rainbow. But first, you’re going home to get changed. You won’t get anybody laid looking like that.”

* * *

Mac walks - stumbles - into the apartment to find Dennis on the couch, laptop open and phone pressed to his ear. His shirt is on inside-out, Mac notices, as he creeps behind to read the screen over his shoulder.

“Who the hell is Joseph Robbins?”

Dennis twists to glare at him. Mac works hard not to notice that the turn brings Dennis eye-level with his lips, and that Dennis doesn’t rectify that straight away.

“I’m on the phone,” Dennis says.

“I can see that,” Mac says. “Who’s Joseph Robbins?”

Dennis says into the phone, “Hold on a sec, your idiot just got home,” and drops it onto the seat beside him. He clicks around the page on the laptop for a couple of seconds, and then -

“Holy shit,” Mac says. 

Mac has seen this man, Joseph Robbins, before. He has seen this man, wrapped in pristine white cotton, naked and afraid and ashamed. He has seen this man with his lips parted and his back arched, and the fear of God in his eyes. Joseph Robbins is his homewrecker.

Dee’s voice squeaks through the speaker on Dennis’s phone, “Why is he my idiot now? You’re the one -”

“You’re breaking up, Dee,” Dennis yells.

“Like hell am I breaking up, Dennis, you’re in your own apartment -”

“I - hear - sorry - gotta - Dee,” he says, and hangs up.

There’s a layer of information here that Mac is missing, he knows it. The pink tinge to Dennis’s ears, though, tells him he’s not going to be in the know any time soon.

“Dee found the guy?” Mac asks.

“Dee found - well, I found the guy,” Dennis says. “Sweet Dee just did the grunt work on it. She did the internet shit, but I. I got the name. I had to threaten to bribe a teenager to get this name.”

Mac looks at him, his face still only inches away. Dennis’s tongue peeks out, just barely, over his bottom lip. The air in the room is stagnant.

“Whatever,” Dennis says. “You’re sure this is the guy?”

Mac swallows. “I’d know him anywhere, man. That’s the goddamn guy.”

“Alright, well,” Dennis says, and looks back at the screen. “Good. Sure. Okay. I’ll, uh, I’ll let Frank know, and he can call his guy - the, uh, private investigator, or whatever - and we can move on to phase two.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask about that,” Mac says. “What the hell is phase two? You absolutely did not explain that last week.”

“I think I did. You probably weren’t listening.”

“Whether I was or wasn’t listening is irrelevant, dude, what the shit is phase goddamn two?”

Dennis shuts his laptop with a sigh. He hefts it under his arm as he stands and turns to look at Mac. “You really need this explained to you again?”

“You didn’t explain it in the first place!”

“Phase two is - you know what, we’ll get there when we get there, I’ll explain it then.” Dennis wanders vaguely in the direction of his room. “I’m going to get changed for Dee’s stupid thing - you should too, man, you look like shit. Nobody’s getting laid looking like that.”

Mac looks down at himself - at pants he’s worn for five days in a row, a ratty t-shirt stained with god knows what, and shoes that don’t match but might in the dark. He tries to remember the last time he did laundry, and draws a blank. “I don’t - fuck you, Dennis.”

“Just trying to offer some advice.”

Mac glares at him, something bitter and mean crawling up to the tip of his tongue. What he says instead is, “You’re actually going? Tonight, I mean.”

Dennis stops at his bedroom door, gripping the handle, and looks at him. His reply takes a long time, but finally comes, “Dee said she’s buying all night as long as I don’t talk to her or any of the other chicks there. I’m about to bankrupt that bitch.”

He opens the door and disappears inside, and Mac is left to wonder what took him so long to come up with an answer like that.

* * *

They pick Dee up at her place, and she nearly rolls her ankle a hundred times trying to get down the stairs in her heels. Her skirt is too short and her legs are too long, and she complains at length about both from the backseat of the Range Rover for the entire ride to the Rainbow. They grab Frank and Charlie along the way, already most of the way to wasted, and leave them at the door when the bouncer refuses to let them in.

Dee staggers off to the ladies’ room the second they’re in the door. She says something about a band-aid that Mac doesn’t catch or care about. Dennis leaves him, too; the gleaming ball of vanity where his heart should be grows three sizes under the warm light of hungry eyes on the dancefloor. Mac feels those same eyes grazing on him, too, but he’s in no mood to be someone’s midnight snack.

A glossy spotlit stool at the bar beckons him.

The bartender could be a model. His skin is dappled a hundred colours under the lights that dance around the club, his hair is just long enough to tug on, and he looks to have lost his affinity for shirts a long time ago. Five months ago, Mac would’ve taken him home.

Now, Mac orders a drink and doesn’t look him in the eye.

It’s strange, he thinks absently, that it feels the same to knock back a third, fourth, fifth vodka here as it does at Paddy’s. The burn in his throat tastes like it’s happening to someone else.

Hunched over at the bar and drowning, he doesn’t see the way Dennis glances casually around the club from the dancefloor. He doesn’t see the way Dennis’s eyes catch on something and his gaze turns to stone. He doesn’t see Dennis, with a vendetta-cold look on his face, half-dance himself out from the sweat of the crowd to join him, just feels clammy hands slip the shot glass from his grasp, grip him by the wrist. Dennis tugs insistently, pulling him into the fray. In this state - in all states, if he’s honest with himself - Mac finds it hard not to follow.

Dennis slicks on a smile like a snake and guides Mac’s hands to his hips, serpents in their own right. 

Mac doesn’t get it, and he doesn’t want to play this game if he doesn’t know the rules.

“Den,” he says, and his words are nearly lost in the sloppy beat of the music, “what is this? What are you doing?”

Dennis leans in close, and his breath against the shell of Mac’s ear is at once obscene and divine.

“Don’t look now,” he says, voice smoother than sin, “but Evan and his whore just walked in.”

Several things bubble inside Mac in that moment. The first, the loudest, is rage. Rage at Evan for dumping him, for cheating on him, for bringing his homewrecker here of all places, tonight of all nights. Rage at himself for letting any of it happen. Then comes a short, sharp stab of fear, exciting the hairs along the back of his neck. He can’t reason with or rationalise that one. Throw in a dash of the longing that won’t leave Mac alone, a pinch of lust, and a crumb more rage for garnish, and he ends up with a surprise nestling into his ribcage and lifting his chin. Determination.

In that moment, Mac takes a deep breath and makes a decision. The wrongness of the situation squeezes his chest, but he makes it anyway.

He grips Dennis by the hips and drags him across the four inches of space between them. They sway, frantic and nervous and guided by the bitter cocktail that the idea of Evan conjures into the pit of Mac’s stomach, to music that is more thunderous beat than anything else. 

Dennis’s arms loop around Mac’s neck, and his mouth ghosts over Mac’s earlobe. “He’s watching.”

There is a line here, a boundary, a ten-storey brick wall built between them that Mac has always been too scared to try to scale. Always, for as long as he can remember, it’s been him one one side and Dennis on the other. Now, with fingers digging light scratches into Mac’s hairline, Dennis is wielding a sledgehammer. 

Dennis says, "We ought to give him a show," and it sounds like treason.

This is an out, and Mac knows it. He can say no, and Dennis will take it, and he can go back to setting his throat on fire at the bar. He can say no, and walk away, and never have to know how this feels. Mac closes his eyes, and lets Dennis trail his lips along his jaw, and knows he never really had a choice.

There’s a desperate awkwardness to what happens next, a moment that shouldn’t be rushed but that they need out of the way, once and for all, as Dennis captures Mac’s lips against his own. It’s wet, and sweat-salty, and bold in the way that forbidden things are.

Over the years, Mac has thought that if he did this, if he just did this, even once, everything would be fine and he’d never have to think about it again. He could kiss him once and have it out of his system for good, and not have to live with the itching under his skin every time Dennis drank a beer straight from the bottle. 

Over the years, Mac knows now, he was wrong.

They break apart, gasping, chests heaving against each other. The song booming around them changes to something faster, the sound of it like gunfire in his ears, and Mac thinks he can feel it match the erratic hammering of his heart.

At some point in all of it, Mac closed his eyes. He flicks them open now, and catches Dennis with his gaze stuck firmly on Mac’s lips. Dennis pushes in again, nose crushed against Mac’s cheek as he presses as close as physics will allow him. Mac opens his mouth to let him in, and thinks he might swallow him whole if this goes on much longer.

Long, dainty fingers grasp Mac’s hair like a drowning man at a straw, and careful nails scratch at his scalp. The sound ripped from Mac’s throat by the sensation is half lost to the roar of the music and the crowd, and half swallowed by Dennis.

Their bodies writhe with the music, an off-beat dance in a sea of strangers, and Mac starts to feel that itch again. It’s a sort of stinging in his fingers, a desperate cry for the touch of skin on skin. He untucks Dennis’s button-down from his jeans and slips one hand underneath the fabric. Dennis is hot with movement but cold with sweat and the feeling of his skin is a delicious kind of electricity. 

Dennis kisses him deeper, grinds against him like his life depends on it. His mouth trails along Mac’s jaw and down, his hand gripping Mac’s hair tighter, pulling to give him better access to Mac’s throat. He bites down, at once gentle and cruel, on the sensitive skin over a vein Mac is sure is about to burst. Dennis licks at the spot, slow and devilish, and moves again to nip at Mac’s earlobe.

Mac says a prayer. It comes out as a curse.

Dennis scrapes his teeth against the bolt of Mac’s jaw, and Mac’s eyes spring open at the shock of it. Somewhere in all the lips and tongues and hands, the music turned them without him noticing, and Mac swims through the alcohol in his blood to re-orientate himself. He makes it, finally, to dry land, and the room stops spinning long enough for him to lock eyes with Evan across the room.

Mac hisses, “Dennis.”

Dennis pulls back, and Mac thinks he hears him groan. He tells himself it’s part of the music.

“What,” Dennis says. He doesn’t move his hand from Mac’s hair.

I can’t do this, Mac thinks.

“I should find Dee,” Mac says. Dennis looks at him then, his brow bunched into a knot a sailor would take pride in, and Mac knows his face has betrayed him.

“You saw him,” Dennis says.

There’s no use in denying, so Mac nods. Dennis moves his hands, then, and cups Mac’s face. He’s gentle, and it surprises Mac more than any sudden roughness would. 

Dennis kisses him once, a touch like syrup, and pulls right back again. Mac wants to chase him - his whole life, he has wanted to chase Dennis, wanted to chase him like he wants to breathe - but Dennis holds him still.

Dennis turns them again, in a way that could be a dance but wouldn’t hold up under close scrutiny. He looks out over Mac’s shoulder, and his face twists into something wicked. He kisses Mac again, like he’s trying to eat him alive, one hand clapped against the back of Mac’s neck.

The air around them is thick with sweat and tension and an icing-sugar voice singing, we can turn the world to gold.

“I’ll be at the bar in fifteen minutes,” Dennis says. “If you can’t find Sweet Dee, meet me there and we’ll get out of here.”

He steps back out of their embrace, his eyes still locked on Mac’s, and disappears into the jungle of bodies. 

* * *

At the bar, Dennis lets himself feel instead of think. It lasts maybe a minute at most, until the shock fades and the shame sets in. He orders a double whiskey. The bartender looks him up and down, a smirk he probably thinks is subtle on his lips. Dennis thinks about taking him home, to avoid thinking about Mac.

It’s a little too familiar, he feels, the act of avoiding Mac in his head. Dodging him in his own thoughts. 

A hard jawline with a bad attitude takes the barstool next to him.

“Dennis,” the jawline says.

Dennis swallows his drink like a shot.

“Where’s Joseph,” he says. “He find another home to wreck?”

“I know what you’re doing,” Evan tells him.

Dennis wants to laugh. “Take a hike, man. I’m meeting someone.”

He flags down the bartender for another drink.

“It won’t work,” Evan says. “He doesn’t love you. Not anymore.”

Dennis sips his whiskey, sucks in air through his teeth, and finally looks at Evan. “Who says he ever stopped? Who says you weren’t just a pit stop?”

“He did. I didn’t believe him, but he did. He told me he’d never love anyone else, not even you.”

“Yeah? And you told him you were his boyfriend. Look how that one turned out.”

“I don’t - what I have with Joey is real.”

Dennis waves his free hand at him, and rolls his eyes to high heaven. “I’ve heard it before, asshole. Fuck off.”

“You know you’re the reason?”

Dennis snaps back to him. “What.”

“You’re the reason I found Joey. You’re the reason I was looking. You’re the reason I didn’t commit to -”

“Don’t you dare say his name. Do not, or so help me - I will flay you. I will hang you against a dirty wall somewhere and I will tear the skin from your bones.”

“I knew he’d go crawling back to you at some point. Truth is, I didn’t care. I didn’t want to keep him.”

Dennis downs the rest of his drink, and his veins burn like gasoline, but it’s not from the alcohol.

“You know what, Evan?” he says. “Save it. I don’t want to hear your goddamn tale of woe, or whatever you’re trying to sell. I don’t want to hear why you think you’re justified in breaking my best friend’s heart. What, just because he might leave you for someone else? You don’t see the irony there?”

“Look, man -”

“Get out of here. Get out of my sight. You’re a scumbag.”

“You would know,” Evan says. He walks away, and Dennis goes back to drinking.

Evan is a shadow in the back of his mind as the bartender pours him another double. Mac, and everything about him and this night, is an oil spill.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the song mac and dennis "dance" to is run away with me by carly rae jepsen


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> vi. sober  
> will you sway with me? go astray with me?

Mac finds Dee coming out of the ladies’ room. Her heels are gone, replaced by hiking boots he’s never seen before, and Dee has definitely never worn before. 

He pulls her aside, into the stairwell by the bathrooms. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been looking all over the goddamn place for you.”

Dee balks at him. “Where have _I_ been? You were supposed to wingman me! I had to wingman myself!”

Mac rolls his eyes with his whole body. “Dee, I do not have time for this. I’m - wait, what do you mean, you had to wingman yourself? Did you already bang someone?”

“No, not yet, we’re going back to - no, what am I saying? You don’t get details! Only wingmen get details! Do you know how hard it is to pick up chicks at a gay bar, Mac? Most of these bitches are straight, and they get offended when I try to hit on them - the fact that I found this one is a goddamn miracle. So I need my wingman. I need you to be around to talk about sucking dicks or whatever so that I can weed out the straight girls and find some real goddamn dykes!”

Mac’s eyes are glazed over, his mind wandering back downstairs to Dennis at the bar, to Dennis on the dancefloor, to Dennis in his hair and on his skin.

Dee slaps him on the shoulder. “Where were you?”

“I was, um -” Mac snaps back to attention. “Me and Dennis. We saw Evan and - and _Joseph_ and things just - time got away from us, or whatever. I’ll tell you later, I have to go.”

Dee’s eyebrows skyrocket. “Oh, you have to go? You have to _go?_ Where in the goddamn shit do you have to go?”

Mac heaves a sigh. It would take five minutes to explain the situation, but it took him ten to find Dee so that’s five minutes he doesn’t have. The liquor is catching up to him now, he can feel it rushing through him. Fog sets in on the sleepy mountain town of Mac’s inhibitions.

Dennis is at the bar, he reminds himself. Dennis is at the bar, and Evan and Joseph are in the building somewhere, and Dee is in front of him right now, and they are all waiting.

“I don’t have time for this right now, Dee,” Mac says. “I’ll wingman you next time. I’ll - I’ll send the hot chicks right over to you next ladies’ night at Paddy’s, okay? Just - I gotta go.”

“Do you promise?”

“Jesus Christ, is this really that important to you?”

Mac tries to slink away down the stairs, but Dee grabs him by the arm and nearly sends him tumbling. 

“Do you promise,” Dee says. Her voice is like gravel.

“Yes! Okay! Jesus, Dee, I hope you don’t bang chicks with those man hands, I feel bad for them now.”

“Oh, go screw yourself.”

“Goddamn it, Dee, I am _trying._ Now will you let me go so I can go continue trying?”

Dee’s eyes go wide, and she releases him so fast she may as well have pushed him down the stairs. “That’s what - _gross,_ Mac.”

* * *

Mac only sees his back as he walks away, hands stuffed in his pockets, but there’s something bizarre and familiar about the gait of the man that vacates the seat next to Dennis at the bar. Mac catches sight of him just as he breaks through the wall of bodies at the edge of the dancefloor, and he thinks the guy might be saying something to Dennis, and Dennis might be flipping him the bird.

Mac settles - falls - onto the empty seat. He tries not to notice that it’s still warm.

“Who was that?” Mac asks. The bartender swings around to them and fills Dennis’s glass.

“Who?”

“The guy whose ass heat I’m absorbing.”

“Oh,” Dennis says. “He’s just, uh. A guy. Pick-up artist. Did you know there’s gay ones?”

“I did not.”

“Turns out there’s not.” Dennis hiccups. “He thought I was a lesbian. Tried to turn me.”

“Is it because you’re drinking tequila? All the chicks on Grey’s Anatomy drink tequila, and they all look like lesbians.”

Dennis swivels his stool to gawk at him. “I’m not - what? This is whiskey, man.”

“Are you sure, dude? That looks like tequila. It’s in a shot glass.”

“Well, they were out of - shut the fuck up, this is whiskey. Asshole.”

Mac slips the glass from his hand, lets his fingers brush against Dennis’s in the trade-off. He brings the glass to his mouth.The electricity under his skin could power a nation. 

Dennis stares at him. His lips part, shiny and pink. His fingers twitch on the bartop before he looks him in the eye, a gaze like quartz.

Mac tips the glass and swallows. Every drop, gone in an instant.

“That’s tequila,” Mac says. He slaps a fist to his chest and tries not to cough. “Definitely tequila.”

“Uh-huh,” Dennis says. He composes himself for a moment, and glances over Mac’s shoulder at - something. 

“Do you want to talk to the bartender about it?” Mac asks. Dennis’s eyes drop to Mac’s mouth, shameless.

Mac keeps talking, somehow, under the weight of Dennis's staring. “I mean, only if you want to, but if he’s not giving you what you wanted, you should say something, right? This isn’t what you want, you came here for something different. You don’t even drink tequila, Den, you drink whiskey. Always have, always will. Or beer, usually, actually. But, I guess, if you really liked this one tequila, it wouldn’t -”

“Jesus Christ, Mac,” Dennis says, and surges forward. Their mouths crash together, a mess of lips and teeth and spit and heat. The momentum of it drags Dennis stumbling to his feet and into the space between them, a foot that feels like a mile. He finds his feet, and his hands fly to Mac’s waist. 

Mac feels the earth move, or maybe it’s Dennis turning his stool so that the lip of the bartop presses against his back. Either way, Mac’s head is spinning, and when Dennis slots himself in between his legs and the hem of his shirt rides up a little bit, it only gets worse. He pulls away, as far as the space will allow him, and holds Dennis’s face in his hands. Just to look at him, he tells himself. Mac tells himself a lot of things. Not many of them turn out to be true.

Dennis bites his lip. “You taste like tequila.”

Mac laughs into his mouth. “So do you.”

Mac leans forward again, into what promises to be more kiss and less assault, but doesn’t quite make it. There’s a tap on his shoulder, and then a hand pulling the back of his shirt.

“What the fuck, man?” He chokes on the words, and whips his head around to see who’s holding him by the scruff. “I’m a little busy here.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” the bartender says. “A lot of people noticed. Kinda hard to miss.”

“Well, do you mind?”

“I’m going to have to ask you two to either keep it tasteful or vacate the premises.”

Mac feels Dennis frown against the palms of his hands, and lets him go. Dennis keeps his hands on Mac’s waist. His fingers graze against the thin band of skin exposed where Mac’s shirt rides up with his raised arms.

“Are you serious right now?” Mac asks the bartender.

“I’m afraid so.”

It takes two seconds of looking around the club for Mac to find what he needs. He points to a seating booth by the back door. 

“That guy is literally getting a handjob right now,” he says, “and we’re what, making out a little?”

“This isn’t personal. There was a complaint made.”

“How is that not personal? I need you to explain to me right now how that’s not personal.”

“I’m not the one that made the complaint -”

“I can guarantee there’s at least four dudes in the bathroom getting blown right now,” Dennis says.

“Like I said -”

“We heard what you said, guy,” Dennis all but spits. “C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

Mac frowns. “Den -”

“I mean it,” Dennis says. The alcohol on his breath isn’t nearly as intoxicating as the sound of his voice. “Let me take you home.”

* * *

Outside, the world has been washed clean. The streetlights bounce off of puddles in the road, and the asphalt is a sea of reflected neon. The sign at the door to the club drips onto Mac’s head as he stumbles into the street after Dennis. The fresh air is cold and sharp on his skin in the same way that gunfire is.

They make it as far as the Range Rover without injury. Mac nearly catches his fingers in the door, and for a brief moment, his vodka-addled brain conjures the pain anyway. He yells, and Dennis looks over at him from the driver’s seat, incredulous.

“What,” Dennis says, in that breathy way that precedes laughter.

“I thought I got my fingers jammed,” Mac says, cradling the almost-victims in his other hand. “God, that would’ve hurt.”

Dennis does laugh then, and for a long time that’s the only sound. It’s a loud, bouncing thing, and it takes up all the air in the car.

“Can we just go?” Mac pleads. “I need a drink, Den. And they’re sure as shit not gonna let us back in after the shit you said to that bartender. I think he was gonna call the police, dude.”

Dennis scoffs and slides the key into the ignition. “I said I’d take you home, didn’t I? I’ll take you home.”

Something about Dennis’s tone sets Mac on edge. His thoughts are cloudy and just out of reach at the best of times - now they swirl and swim with possibilities of what Dennis means, what comes next, what happens now.

The engine catches, and Mac somehow digs up the sense to check around for cops. Dennis peels out from the curb. He nearly takes out a trash can on the way but swerves just in time, into the opposite lane. It takes a while for him to notice he’s on the wrong side of the road, and even longer to correct it.

“Bro,” Mac says, after ten minutes of alternating snail’s pace and breakneck speeds through the streets of Philly, “you’re drunk. Should we be driving?”

“What, you want to get out and call a cab?” Dennis snaps. “You may as well pull out your wallet and empty it out the window, it’s a goddamn scam this time of night.”

Mac blinks at him. “What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Night time. Shut up, I’m trying to - to, um. What’s the word? God, what’s the _word_ -”

“Concentrate?”

“Yeah. Christ. Don’t make me talk when I’m trying to drive, Mac. It’s not dangerous. No, wait, it is. What did I say?”

Mac starts giggling then, the sound of it bubbling up from his chest like acid reflux. Dennis looks at him, and he looks at Dennis, and the Range Rover’s path curves toward a tree like a magnet. Some stroke of luck graces them, and Mac looks away just in time. His hand flies to the steering wheel, wrapped around Dennis’s on one side, and jerks it the other direction.

“Holy Christ, Mac, what the hell?”

“We nearly died, Den! You were gonna hit a tree!” 

Mac doesn’t move his hand. He can’t. His pulse throbs at his neck, and he calls it adrenaline, but he’s never been good with names. He nearly laughs again, his muddy thoughts telling him this isn’t real - but here he is again, with Dennis’s skin under his fingertips, and it’s more real than anything in the world.

Where moments ago the air was light and dizzy, the quiet of this touch is a dead weight. Dennis moves, lets go of the steering wheel, and Mac’s hand is still on his. Dennis doesn’t shake him off. Mac stares straight ahead at the road, barely moving beneath them as the Range Rover crawls down the street.

Dennis lifts their hands to his mouth and presses a kiss to Mac’s knuckles.

The Range Rover comes to a halt. 

Momentum can only carry you so far.

The warm pressure of Dennis’s lips is gone now, and for a moment Mac thinks he can stop being on fire.

Dennis lays his hand on Mac’s thigh, stares ahead of him, and presses down on the gas. He squeezes, just barely, when they turn onto their street. Mac wonders if it will leave scorch marks.

* * *

The door is closed behind them not even a full second before Mac says, “Let’s do shots.”

Dennis leans his weight on the fridge door. “I think we’ve only got beer, man.”

He whips around at the distinct slam of a bottle on the table, off in the living room that seems a million miles away from the kitchen. Mac clinks quietly as he brings two shot glasses to join it. 

Dennis takes the bottle by the neck, squints at the label. “What the fuck is this? Is this even English?”

“It’s, uh, coffee or chocolate or something,” Mac says. “I stole it from Frank like a decade ago. I think it’s European.”

Dennis unscrews the top and pours. “To well-aged - um, whatever this is.”

Mac lifts his shot in salute, and keeps his eyes trained on the careful way Dennis’s fingers wrap around the rim of his.

“To drinking,” Mac says, and they drink. They drink, and they cough, and they swear, and they curse Frank and his foreign liquor.

“Oh, Christ, that’s like acid,” Dennis says, his voice buried alive under the sour-sweet taste. “What the hell is that? Is that caramel?”

“It’s goddamn disgusting is what it is,” Mac says, still coughing. “Do you want another round?”

Dennis looks at him, pained, and says, “Hit me.”

They go through half the bottle at a rate that feels like a single drop at a time. They drink mostly in silence, until the shock of it wears off and the alcohol starts to get to work. Before long they are slumped to the floor in front of the couch, legs stretched out underneath the coffee table now stained with missed drops of caramel evil. 

Mac says, “I don’t know how it happened! I can’t figure out where she got them, Den, I really can’t. Is there just some butch chick walking around Philly now with Dee’s heels on? Did she kill someone and steal them? How are they even her size?”

Dennis laughs. He takes the bottle from the table and swigs from it. He misses his mouth at first, and a single line of liquid amber streaks down his chin and hangs on there, waiting to drop. He puts the bottle back on the table. It teeters dangerously, then settles, safe again.

Mac looks at him with true sincerity. He says, “Dee’s feet are so huge, Den.”

The drop calls to him, and he doesn’t notice himself moving further into Dennis’s space until he’s also seeing the way their sugary poison coats Dennis’s lips like mirrors.

“You know what they say about big feet,” Dennis says. His voice is barely there, a wisp of a thing, as Mac draws nearer.

“What do they say?” Mac asks, and never finds out. He pushes in until he can feel Dennis’s breath on his own lips, and the soft scratch of Dennis’s eyelashes against his cheek as his eyes flutter closed. He lets Dennis come the rest of the way himself.

The kiss is sudden and feverish, all greedy pressure and harsh syrup on their lips. Mac’s hands are sticky as he runs them down the sides of Dennis’s arms. His shirt is still untucked from when they were at the Rainbow, a hundred years ago now, and the exposure of the skin there to even the stale, clinging air of their apartment is a cold shock compared to the heat of Dennis’s tongue tracing along his bottom lip, looking for an opening. He finds one and dives in, his hands holding Mac’s face, refusing him even an inch to gasp for air.

There’s a seriousness to this go around, a sort of grotesque urgency they didn’t have at the bar. Every touch, every sound, every erratic beat of Mac’s heart in his chest - it all feels bigger than it did three hours ago. The apartment is dead silent but for the sounds of their mouths moving together and the quiet rustling of clothes.

Dennis pulls away, and the sheen on his lips is no longer sugary sweet liquor. He doesn’t move far, staying close enough that Mac can still taste the alcohol on his breath. He says, “Take off your shirt.”

It’s more of a breathless plea than anything else, but Mac’s hands shoot up to the buttons of his shirt like it’s a military order. Dennis kisses him again, ferocious lips swollen and rosy, and Mac crashes into the coffee table trying to do both things without the brain power to do even one correctly. The bottle of mystery caramel liqueur falls. The last dregs spill out across the table, turning the surface into the world’s least appealing ocean.

“Shit, fuck, ow,” Mac says. He falls on his ass like a toddler, farther away from Dennis than he’s been all night. He rubs at the spot on his arm where he bumped the table until it stops throbbing. He tries the buttons again, and hears Dennis laugh at him.

“Fuck off, man,” he says. “I’m drunk. Buttons are hard.”

Dennis hums. “Let me help.”

“No, I can do it -”

“Mac,” Dennis says, already up on his feet and making his way over, “let me help you.”

Dennis reaches him, pulls him up to his feet. Dennis crowds him all the way to the couch, where he pushes Mac down to sit, and drapes himself across his lap, one knee on either side. 

“Dennis, I -” Mac says.

Dennis hushes him with a kiss, slow and deep. It’s not as dangerous as before, but there’s still a fire there, and Mac wants nothing more than to burn. When his lips are his own again, he finds the buttons of his shirt undone and Dennis smiling down at him with something akin to pride in his eyes. 

Dennis pushes the shirt down off his shoulders, slow and agonising, all the way down his arms until it’s tucked into the folds of the sofa to be rediscovered at a later date. He bends down and presses his lips to the exposed skin either side of Mac’s sweat-patched vest undershirt. He tugs at the hem, fingers dangerously close to Mac’s waistband, and sits back on Mac’s lap as he pulls it off.

There are hands on Mac’s bare chest then; whisper-light touches all over his skin draw a hiss that becomes a panting deep breath from somewhere far down inside him. Mac rushes upwards into a kiss that sears like the fire lit in the pit of his stomach. Dennis holds the side of his face with one hand and grips the back of the couch with the other and - maybe on purpose, maybe not - grinds down further into Mac’s lap. 

Mac gasps, the sound of it swallowed by Dennis’s open mouth. His hands find Dennis’s thighs and pull him closer, closer, closer, until their bodies are flush against each other and he can hardly breathe. He rubs up and down Dennis’s legs as they kiss, daring to go just that little bit higher each time, until Mac has his hands on Dennis’s ass, holding him there.

The denim is rough on his hands, harsher than he expects. He breaks away, breath coming in heaving gasps, and says, “These have to go.”

Dennis kisses him again, once, long and lingering and unbearable. “Two can play that game, sweetheart.”

Mac slips a hand between them and palms at Dennis through his jeans. He cups his hand and presses down with the heel. The sound it rips from Dennis’s throat is inhuman. 

“Jesus fuck,” Dennis says. “Maybe you have a point.”

He stands then, and Mac nearly catches frostbite from the sudden shock of air on his skin. Dennis shucks his shirt over his head like lightning, miles of pale skin stretched taut against bones that might take your eye out. Mac feels his eyes go wide, distracted enough by the thought of getting his hands back on Dennis that he barely notices the graceless way Dennis rips off his shoes and socks, and tugs his jeans off.

Dennis stands looking down at Mac in nothing but his briefs, and Mac is ravenous.

Mac is on his feet in a second. He wraps an arm around Dennis’s hips and kisses him, sloppy and careless and starving. Always starving. 

Dennis’s hands go to Mac’s waistband, and a thrill runs down Mac’s spine at the thought of it. The thought of _this,_ actually happening.

Dennis pulls away. Mac chases him, and Dennis lets him for a minute, before pushing a hand on his chest.

“You wore a belt?” Dennis says. “To a gay bar?”

“It’s not like -”

“To a _gay bar?_ ”

“Dennis,” Mac says. “I wasn’t - I didn’t have _plans._ I didn’t have any expectations, or whatever. I went for Sweet Dee, because we’re, like, in cahoots now, I guess, but -”

“C’mon, man, I’m naked, don’t talk about my sister -”

“Then shut up,” Mac tells him, smiling against his lips, “and let me do something about it.”

Mac grabs him by the underside of his thighs and lifts, slotting their mouths together again as he goes. Dennis purrs, and laughs into the kiss. He wraps his legs around Mac’s waist and lets himself be carried to his own bedroom. He holds tight as Mac fiddles with the doorknob, crossing his feet behind Mac’s back and pressing in closer.

Inside, finally, Mac drops Dennis on the bed like littering. Without ceremony, he strips out of his shoes, socks, and pants. Dennis sits against the headboard and watches.

Mac makes it down to just his briefs, and hesitates under the pressure of Dennis’s gaze. “What?”

“Nothing,” Dennis says. “Just, I’m usually on the other side. It’s weird from this end of it.”

“Bad weird? Or good weird?”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

Mac steps out of his briefs.

He makes his way to the bed, and Dennis scrambles for the bedside drawer. It hits Mac, then, that they’re doing this. They’re actually doing this. It’s going to happen, and it might be bad weird or it might be good weird, or it might just be bad or it might just be good. 

Dennis drops a bottle of lube onto the bed and grabs Mac’s hand. He pulls Mac down on top of him, and there are those hands again, on his chest, nails up and down his back. Mac holds himself up on one arm, his other hand coming to a rest at the top of Dennis’s thigh. He tugs down on Dennis’s briefs, a silent question, and Dennis hums into his mouth.

Mac pats around on the bed for the lube, finds it and pops the cap. He falls onto his back to squeeze a healthy amount onto one hand. He looks at Dennis then, his pupils blown wide and dark, and kisses his spit-shiny lips as he wraps a hand around him. Mac moves to suck at the soft skin of his throat, and Dennis lets out a strangled cry.

From there it’s quick and dirty: Mac’s hand is swift along Dennis’s cock, and skilled enough to draw out moans that get him hotter and more bothered than he’s been in a long, long time. Dennis’s back arches, once, when Mac runs his thumb across his slit, and he pushes against Mac’s shoulder.

“You good?” Mac asks. His hand stills. Dennis keeps the pressure on his shoulder.

“I’m good,” Dennis says, “just - ah - just, can you -”

Mac ducks down and takes him in his mouth. Dennis whispers his name into the night and buries his fingers in Mac’s hair. Mac swirls his tongue around the head, and takes as much in as he can, until his nose is pressed into the divot of Dennis’s hip, and -

Dennis cries out, a desperate and animal sound. He pulls on Mac’s hair until it hurts, and spills into his mouth. Mac licks him clean.

He crawls back up along Dennis’s body and presses his lips to the side of his neck. He kisses and licks and drags his teeth over the skin there in time with Dennis’s heavy breathing. He wraps one hand around himself and slides just the way he likes it. Dennis tips his chin up to kiss him and bats the hand away.

Mac’s breath sticks in his throat at the feeling of Dennis’s hand on him.

The kissing, the scratch of nails down his back, the memory of the weight of Dennis against his tongue - it all catches up to him then, sudden like an earthquake, and the fire in the pit of his stomach drinks in the gasoline that is Dennis’s touch. He comes, fast and hard, at the first drag of Dennis’s hand along his shaft.

Spent, Mac collapses against Dennis. He buries his face in the space where Dennis’s neck meets his shoulder, and feels himself go boneless. Dennis shoves him off, rough but not mean. 

He melts into the bed. Quiet creeps into his mind, for the first time in months.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next chapter will be a little late unfortunately!! i have exams and assignments for college and won't have time to edit it until I'm done :((


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> vii. sober ii  
> all the glamour and the trauma and the fucking melodrama

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i took a month off to do exams and assignments but we're BACK and more EMOTIONALLY TUMULTUOUS than ever!!!

Mac wakes in his own bed with only the pounding behind his temples for company. 

He’s naked, but for the tattered sheet across his legs. A distinct feeling of something being  _ missing _ plagues him. He is hopelessly, desperately confused by both of these facts.

The clock by the bed tells him it’s past noon and has been for a while. His mouth full of sand and throat not much better, he calls out, “Dennis?” and no answer comes.

He swallows dust and tries again. “Dennis?”

No answer. He slumps back into the mattress. He thinks he can feel his brain rattle around his skull with every movement of his head. He knows it will be worse later, that he needs to get up and drink some water or eat something or at the very least take a piss, but he can’t fathom it. The idea of even sitting up in bed makes him retch.

He lets sleep take him again.

* * *

There’s a ringing somewhere in the apartment, and Mac jerks awake at the sound of it. He thinks, for a moment, that the sound is a symptom of the almost tangible pain in his head. It’s his phone, he realises eventually, discarded somewhere on the other side of his bedroom door. He waits it out, the banging in his head growing more thunderous with every chime.

It stops. 

He sighs in relief.

The ringing starts up again.

“For the love of God,” Mac says. He saw a nature documentary once, when he was in the habit of getting wasted in front of the TV, that said the Arctic was actually the driest place on Earth, not any of the deserts, because the Arctic goes longer without rain than any other place on the planet. Mac thinks now, trying to engage the arid environment of his hungover throat, that that’s bullshit.

He braces himself, and swings his legs over the side of the bed, sitting upright. It feels like a mistake. His head spins, and something unpleasant turns in his gut. He chokes it down long enough to get to his feet, and from there hopes gravity is on his side. He staggers noisily out into the living room, where his phone is ringing louder than a jet engine on the kitchen table.

He picks up and rasps, “Charlie?”

“Christ, okay, good,” Charlie yells down the line. “You’re alive. Pick up your goddamn phone once in a while, Mac. Jesus.”

“I’m gonna need you to be quieter,” Mac says. “And slower.”

Charlie sighs. “Where the hell are you, man?”

“I’m at home,” Mac says. “Where else would I be?”

“Is Dennis there?”

Mac glances around the place. Dennis’s door is closed, so he can’t know for sure, but there’s no sign of life in the apartment. He spies a white tank top on the floor by the couch and wonders whose it is.

“Uh, no,” he says. “No, I don’t think so. What the hell happened last night, Charlie?”

Charlie ignores his question. “He’s not answering his phone.”

“So?” The furious pounding behind Mac’s eyes makes it a little hard for him to care.

“So, do you know where he - oh shit, he just walked in. False alarm.”

“Charlie, I can’t deal with your crap right now, man. I’m hungover as shit.”

“Whatever, man, just get to Paddy’s. You still work here. Hey, Dennis, what’s -” The line goes dead.

* * *

It’s three hours until Paddy’s opens for its third-ever ladies’ night, and Dennis is pacing. He’s been pacing for a century, maybe two, waiting. Waiting for - something. His button down is sweat almost all the way through, and the carefully precise bed-head he arrived with has long since been vanquished by the forces of his hands tugging at his hair every few loops. 

Dee watches him like a cat watches an aquarium.

Dennis mutters something to himself. That’s new, Dee notes. 

He keeps pacing. Each time he completes a loop, the sick sound of the sole of his shoe ripping up from a sticky patch on the floor tears through the bar.

“You’re gonna wear out the floor,” Dee says. 

He doesn’t look at her, but at his hands, spread palms-up in front of him like he’s weighing his options.

He mutters something again - maybe he’s repeating himself, maybe he’s not, there’s no way to know - and Dee can’t take it anymore. She stands, sharp, and loops her arm around his. She drags him to the back office, and he goes with her like he doesn’t know she’s even there. 

He stands in the middle of the room, suddenly motionless. His eyes are out of focus and his fingers twitch.

Dee shuts the door behind her. “Dennis?”

He starts pacing again.

“For the love of - Dennis!” 

“Jesus Christ, Dee,” Dennis says, stopping dead in his tracks. He looks at her like he’s just noticed she’s there. “I’m busy! Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“You’ve been pacing for an hour!”

“I’m  _ busy! _ ”

Dee falls silent at that and they watch each other for a moment, each of them a panther and a gazelle, hunter and hunted.

Dennis starts to walk again towards the door. Dee slams a fist down on the desk so hard she hears the insides of Frank’s fossil of a computer rattle. “So help me, Dennis, I will tie you down!”

He startles at that, eyebrows raised and mouth curled down unpleasantly. He’s at the door now, his hand hovering over the handle. He turns his back to Dee and his shoulders slump forward. Dee hears a quiet  _ thump _ as his forehead makes contact with the wood.

“I did something stupid,” Dennis says to the flaking paint. His voice is low, and if Dee didn’t know any better, she’d say it sounded pained. “I did something really stupid.”

“What did you do?” she asks. “Does it have anything to do with why we don’t have a doorman two and a half hours from opening?”

“I talked to Evan,” Dennis says. He turns the lock on the door and sinks to the floor against it, knees up to his ears. Dee drops like a stone into the rusted old chair behind the desk, all colour drained from her face. 

“You did what?” she hisses, and her cheeks are starting to pink back up again.

“Last night. At the Rainbow,” he says. “He was there with Joseph. So I - Christ, Dee, I made out with Mac where he could see so he’d feel like crap, or some other high school horseshit, and he came over and talked to me when Mac went looking for you.”

Dee is quiet for a minute. Then, almost despite herself, “Well, what’d he say?”

“He told me he cheated on Mac because he thought Mac would leave him for me.”

Dee doesn’t say anything. Dennis doesn’t either, not for a long time.

“That’s -” Dee starts, then falters, unsure where to go with it. “That’s a lot to unload on a stranger at a bar.”

“We can’t do the next part anymore,” he says. “I don’t think it’ll work. The way I talked to him - they’ll be expecting it, probably. We can’t pull it off.”

The topic change is a sharp left turn with a sheer drop on one side, and Dee’s head spins with it for a second. “Last night wasn’t about the plan. You -  _ we _ had no idea they would be there. We can still do the plan, Dennis. I didn’t spend the last month catfishing Joseph goddamn Robbins for you to back out on this now.”

“That’s not - do you ever think about anyone other than yourself?”

“Do  _ you? _ Last night was supposed to be about me!”

“Christ, just listen to yourself - you know what?” Dennis huffs. “We’ll figure something else out. We can still use the catfishing thing. We’ll jam it in there somewhere if it’ll get you to stop talking about it.”

“I put a lot of work into this thing, Dennis, I just don’t want to see it go to waste.”

“It’s fine,” Dennis says, and Dee can hear the lie in his voice. “Just keep doing whatever you’re doing, we’ll find a way to fold it into whatever we come up with.”

He sighs then, a great heaving thing that takes up space in the room. He buries his face between his knees and wraps his hands around his ankles. His knuckles glow white.

Dee watches him for what feels like a long time, and he doesn’t move. She watches his body shift with the not-quite-rise-and-fall of his laboured breathing and wonders if having to change a plan known only by himself really warrants this kind of reaction.

Tentative, and with an excuse ready like a gun taped to her back, she asks, “What happened last night, Dennis?”

“What do you mean?” he says, barely lifting his head. “I told you what happened with Evan.”

“You told me part of it,” she corrects him. This is a dangerous line to walk, and she knows it. “There’s more, isn’t there?”

Dennis looks at her, and she’s surprised to find she doesn’t want him to. There’s something in his eyes, a look with cruel edges, that doesn’t sit comfortable on hers. She holds his gaze, though, and it feels like defiance. His mouth is a flat line.

“Yeah,” he says. “There’s more.”

He falls quiet again, and Dee lets him sit like that for longer than she really intends to. It must be ten minutes, she guesses, that they spend in that tense silence. She watches him, and he watches her, and she waits for him to speak until she can’t wait anymore.

“Are you going to tell me?” she says. “We’re on the clock, here, Dennis. Either spill or don’t, but we’re opening soon and -”

“Alright,” Dennis says. “Alright. Okay. I’ll tell you. Just - just give me a second. I need to - I have to get there first.”

Dee scrunches up her face at that. “Oh, no, you didn’t, did you? God, do I even want to know? I don’t want to hear -”

“Will you shut up? I said I’d tell you.”

“You’re taking a long goddamn time to tell, Dennis, what am I supposed to think? I know what you’re like, it’s not that far a leap to -”

“Jesus Christ! Enough already!” Dennis says. 

“Then get on with it!”

He takes a deep breath and looks her dead in the eye. “Me and Mac banged, okay? We got drunk sitting on the floor of our living room and then I let him carry me to my own goddamn bed, and I don’t know if it was a mistake or if he even remembers it. Is that what you want to hear, Dee? You want to hear about how Mac blew me and I came after two minutes like a fucking teenager? How I had to drag his barely-conscious body to his room so I wouldn’t have to wake up next to him? How I’ve been avoiding him all day, hoping he’s still passed out at home, because I can’t figure out if I did what I did last night because I wanted to or because I was still pissed from talking to goddamn  _ Evan? _ ”

He’s on his feet now, stalking towards her. He braces himself on the edge of the desk and doesn’t look at her. His hair, damp with sweat from the effort of talking so seriously for so long, peels away from his face as his head hangs, awaiting judgement.

“Are you for real right now?” Dee asks. “You’re not just fucking with me for being on your case?”

Dennis says to the chipped wood of the desk, “No, Dee, I am not fucking with you.”

“Okay,” Dee says, taking great care to keep her voice even. The last thing Dennis needs right now is for him to not be the only one freaking out.

Dee glances at the clock on the wall. Two hours until they open for their busiest night of the week, and their bartender is a sweaty, panicked mess. From the way he shakes leaning on the desk, she can tell this won’t be a quick fix unless she refuses to dance around like she knows he’ll try to make her.

“What do you mean, you don’t know if you wanted to?” Dee asks. She leans forward to rest her elbows on the desk, into his space but not entirely invasive.

Dennis doesn’t answer. His hands curl into fists and he leans on them, his back a sloping hill.

“Are you -” Dee stops herself. As much as she needs to get to the heart of the problem as quickly as possible, that one’s too big too soon. “Do you have feelings for Mac?”

“Fuck you,” Dennis says. 

“Do you?” she asks again. 

He doesn’t answer, but he looks at her. Maybe the worried slack of his mouth and the unhappy furrow of his brow are answer enough.

_ Well, _ Dee thinks as she collapses back into the chair. It creaks painfully beneath her.  _ Goddamn. _

* * *

Mac skulks into Paddy’s with ten minutes to spare before the start of his shift. He snags a shot of tequila Dee has poured for herself - Dennis busies himself at the other end of the bar, moving like a magnet forced against the wrong pole - and he relishes in the familiar burn of it. And then -

And then.

There are no flashes, no snippets, no echoes of conversation. It’s not like in the movies. There is only the moment before, when he knew nothing, and now, when he knows everything. It’s not patchy or hazy - it’s fluid, like he’s watching the events of that night on an old TV with a screen a mile thick. 

His eyes wander to Dennis like a nuclear bomb wanders to a Japanese city. 

He drops the shot glass onto the bartop and wipes the liquor from his mouth and knows the feeling of Dennis’s lips on his. 

He stands at the door and does his job and knows the cool heat of Dennis’s hands on his skin.

He checks birthdays and tells a redhead in Doc Martens to talk to the blonde waitress about a drinks offer he makes up on the spot and knows the sound Dennis makes when he falls apart.

He knows and knows and knows and knows, all night long, and Dennis doesn’t look at him.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [tumblr](https://goldrushzukka.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/carlyraejervis?s=09/)


End file.
